BackTrack Linux - Penetration Testing Distribution

BackTrack, Present and Future

muts — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:58:15 +0000

Information security experts who focus on penetration testing rely on BackTrack as the leading distribution for their practices. BackTrack started as a personal side project well over 5 years ago and by now has been downloaded over 5 million times.

Many people have devoted countless hours of their lives to make sure BackTrack is the best it can be. Now it is time to take that to the next level. Offensive Security has started officially funding the development of BackTrack, allowing for a more steady development cycle.

Together with the unbelievable support and help of the open source community which has cared for us over the years, we are ready to take BackTrack to a whole new level. This move will give BackTrack the momentum it needs to maintain real time updates, to support full time quality development and explore new and exciting options in the development of the world’s #1 choice distribution for penetration testers.

What does this mean? This means that from this day onwards, the BackTrack distribution will have a more stable development cycle, more versatility and better QA – while remaining free, as always. This move has also allowed us to build a BackTrack roadmap for the first time in its history. Yes, that’s right…that’s “BackTrack 5″ written there…

Lastly, you can finally get those awesome BackTrack Vinyl stickers online – check out our swag page.

How Strong is your Fu – For Charity

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:18:21 +0000

Offensive Security, together with BlackHat and HFC are organizing an amazing CTF on the 19th of June, 2010. Registration costs 49 $US, and all proceeds go to HFC. The prizes being offered are a BlackHat Conference Ticket, (Las Vegas 2010) for 1st place, and a CTP Online Course as the runner up. Registration is limited to the first 102 signups, and seats are running out fast! Register to the Cyber Hacking Challenge now!

BackTrack used by the NSA

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:38:14 +0000

The National Security Agency and the Central Security Service tested the five U.S. service academies during the 2009 Cyber Defense Exercise.Teams were tested on their ability to defend computer networks the students designed themselves. The winner took home the coveted CDX trophy. In an unclassified movie produced by the NSA, we caught a glimpse of BackTrack being used in the CyberDefence 2009 Wargames.

Social Engineering Toolkit Training Available

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:18:22 +0000

The Social-Engineering Toolkit (SET) was designed by David Kennedy (ReL1K) and incorporates many useful Social-Engineering attacks all in one simplistic interface. The main purpose of SET is to automate and improve on many of the social-engineering attacks out there. As pentesters, social-engineering is often a practice that not many people perform. A set of new set of videos called “Social Engineering Toolkit Training” has been made available – the pentesters choice for Client Side Attacks and other Social Engineering related attacks. Check them out here and here.

Taken directly from the social-engineer.org site:

The downloads of the latest release of the Social Engineering Toolkit has been truly remarkable. The new additions to the tool are just amazing in itself.

Yet we get a lot of requests for tutorials and/or training on how to effectively use the tool. We heard your cries for help and asked Dave to help us out. Dave put together a series of training videos showing how to complete some of the main attacks with SET.

We then added a whole new section added to the resources page that is just for SET Tutorials. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Hello BackTrack, Hola BackTrack, 你好BackTrack

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:17:00 +0000

With a GREAT effort from local BT community leaders, we are proud to present translated versions of the BackTrack website. We are currently almost done with the Chinese and Spanish versions, and working hard on Portuguese and French. If you are an established BackTrack Forums user with 250 posts and above, and would like to translate the BackTrack-Linux to your own language, please contact us through IRC. A big thanks to huatux, fuurio, error500 and fataku for the excellent work so far.

As time goes on, more and more localized content will be posted, such as “How to get BackTrack to like Chinese”. For Spanish speaking users, we have a BackTrack IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, #backtrack-es.

Offensive Security Hacking Tournament

muts — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:29:50 +0000

If you’re itching to hack something, and need a real challenge, Offensive Security Training has set up a cool hacking tournament which is open to the public. Information about the challenge, as well as registration to it will start on April 23rd. The actual event will take place on May 8-9th, over a weekend. Send the wife to a weekend spa, the kids to the neighbors, close the dog up in the bathroom – whatever it takes to get quality time for your favorite pastime – ethical hacking.

Keep your eyes open on the Information Security Training blog for more details about the challenge, on April 23rd.

BackTrack 4 – Over 1,000,000 Downloads

muts — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:59:25 +0000

We’re stunned. Flabbergasted even. Since the release, the download count hasn’t stopped running…and we’ve finally hit 1,000,000 downloads. In reality, the download count is probably much higher, as we’ve been counting unique IPs only (to prevent false counts caused by download managers – The NON UNIQUE count is well over 3 million downloads).

We have exciting new developments going on, as well as a whole new BackTrack development infrastructure which should allow for major improvements in the future…stay tuned!

BackTrack Forums and International Communities

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:01:22 +0000

We have finally got around to migrate the old BackTrack forums to the new ones, import all users, and re-open the international communities. Our current active international communities are: Portuguese, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

These new forums provide an opportunity for non English speakers to have a formal outlet for their BackTrack related issues. Bienvenidos, Bienvenue, Bem vindo, Benvenuto and Willkommen to you all!

Aircrack-NG aquired by the BackTrack Team

muts — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:21:17 +0000

The BackTrack team is happy to announce the acquisition of the Aircrack-NG project, as well as a new, long awaited update to v 1.1. The acquisition will mark a turning point to the Aircrack-NG project in more than once sense, and we are looking forward to seeing the project grow.

The new version of Aircrack-ng (now renamed “backcrack-ng“) is available in the Aircrack SVN repository:

svn co http://trac.aircrack-ng.org/svn/tags/1.1 backcrack-ng

Relief for (some) Broadcom Wireless Users (soon)

muts — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:20:05 +0000

Kernel 2.6.34 (RC2 for now) delivers fixed Broadcom b43 drivers, and allows injection with 4315 and 4312 chipsets. This kernel is currently in testing, and should be out of RC stages in a couple of months. As of now, it seems that the future transition of BackTrack to this kernel will bring a significant amount of improvements, as well as a more mature mac80211 stack.

For anyone interested in testing this “out-of-band” kernel – we will soon post instructions on how to do this.

In other news – congratulations are in order to Offensive Security for becoming GSA certified !