23 March 2007

BackTrack 2.0 and Parallels

I know that BackTrack 2.0 was release about a week ago now, but I'm only getting around to writing about it now as I only got my MacBook Pro a couple of days ago, and I didn't have a chance to download it or try it out. For those of you who are unfamiliar with BackTrack, it is probably the ultimate penetration tester's bootable Linux distro. BackTrack is what came out of a merger between two of the most famous security related bootable Linux distro's, namely Whax and the Auditor Security Collection. From a pen-tester's point of view, it really does have everything that you could want in a live Linux distro, and more. Here are some of the new features in version 2.0 * Updated Kernel-Running 2.6.20, with several patches. * Broadcom based wireless card support * Most wireless drivers are built to support raw packet injection * Metasploit2 and Metasploit3 framework integration * Alignment to open standards and frameworks like ISSAF and OSSTMM * Redesigned menu structure to assist the novice as well as the pro * Japanese input support-reading and writing in Hiragana / Katakana / Kanji. You can download it from http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html Now I also mentioned Parallels in the subject of this one, which is something that I have been dying to play with since before I got my MacBook Pro, and well, all I can say is that I am shocked at the speed of it. I installed BackTrack 2.0 on a virtual disk within Parallels, allocated 256MB of RAM to it, and to say that it's damn quick would be an understatement. This blows away my dedicated Linux PC at work! Maybe later on today I'll install XP within Parallels and see how that goes, but at this point, I am really impressed. I know have the perfect setup, OS X as my main OS, and then BackTrack for anything that I can't run within OS X, from a penetration testing point of view, this really is perfect. I'm kinda regretting ordering an Alienware laptop for work now, but hey, I kinda need it to run Core Impact and WebInspect, so I'm sure it'll be worthwhile, when I get it of course. Alienware's build time seems to take forever! Anyway, if anyone reading this hasn't tried BackTrack 2.0 or Parallels yet, do yourself a favour and go and try it out. Love Never Dies [part 1] from the album "7" by Apoptygma Berzerk

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello. I was wondering if you got backtrack 2 to work with your MBP's internal Airport Extreme card or if your using a 3rd party usb wifi adapter. I can't get my internal card to be recognized from within KDE (i have a 2.33 GHz MBP). Unlike yourself I'm booting into Backtrack via the cd... Very new to this all so any help would be appreciated... Thanks!

xyberpix said...

Hi Sean,

Nope unfortunately, I can't seem to get the Airport Extreme card working either. I'm using an external USB adapter at the moment. If I do figure out a way though, I'll post it here.