Back Track 3 - A Hacker’s Dream

BackTrack 3, put on by the amazing folks at Remote-Exploit, has grown to become the industry standard for a complete Linux penetration testing (aka “hacking”) platform. BackTrack 2 was the first real release of the distro back in March 2007 and was built off a combination of WHAX and the Auditor Security Collection. The system has grown since then but has remained very configurable on the user-end, with a lot of support for customizable scripts and custom kernels. BackTrack aims to be quick and effective. Backtrack provides a thorough pentesting environment which is bootable via CD, USB or the network (PXE). The tools are arranged in an intuitive manner, and cover most of the attack vectors.

If the Live CD method does not appeal to you, you can always use BackTrack through a USB drive or just simply install in to your hard drive. If you go with the hard drive method, it only takes a measly 2.7 GB, so multi-boot systems should be very simple to get running with it. Now for a quick run down of what makes BackTrack 3 great: It has a massive list of penetration tools that can be put into thirteen nice categories (some highlights are listed below, but for a complete list check out The Official BackTrack 3 Wiki)…

Information Gathering: Nmbscan 1.2.4, PsTools, FingerGoogle, FPort 2.0, various DNS tools

Network Mapping: Hping, Netcat 0.7.1, Nmap, Unicorn Scan

Vulnerability Identification: various Cisco tools, OpenSSL Scanner, SMB suite, SQL Inject & Scanner

Penetration: Frameworks 3, Milw0rm archive

Privilege Escalation: Etherape, Hydra, ICMP tools, John the Ripper, Mailsnarf, Medusa, Wireshark

Maintaining Access: Backdoors, HTTP Tunnel, Iodine, socat

Covering Tracks: Housekeeping

Radio Network Analysis: Air Crack suite, CowPatty, Kismet, MacChanger

Bluetooth: Bluesmash, ObexFTP, Redfang

VOIP & Telephony Analysis: SIP suite, Pcap suite

Digital Forensics: Autopsy, Mboxgrep, DCFLDD

Reverse Engineering: GDB suite, Hexdump, Hexedit

Services: SNORT

As if that wasn’t enough, the Remote-Exploit Forum has great tutorials and member-driven help to get you up and running with all these tools. Be sure to check out the official BackTrack IRC room at irc.freenode.net #remote-exploit. If you are in need of any immediate help, I’m sure someone there would be glad to assist you. Fair warning though, going onto a chat room or forum and asking very experienced people about “how to hack my neighbor’s wireless internetz” is not going to get you anywhere but banned. Discussing illegal uses of the above software and of BackTrack is strictly prohibited on their forums and IRC chat. Figure out how to do it yourself, or better yet, don’t do it at all.