BackTrack Security LiveCD Beta

I don't watch football (Superbowl? What's that?) so while the entire US is shut down to watch an East Coast/West Coast smackdown, of course I'm playing with the new BackTrack LiveCD.

In case you're not familiar with this project, this is the first beta release of the projects formerly known as Auditor and WHAX, merged into a single distribution that looks, on first glance, like a really strong offering.

I never used WHAX, but I have followed Auditor for about a year. It was a really nice collection of pre-installed security tools, mostly hacking and cracking packages like network scanners, vulnerability assessment tools, bluetooth utils, password crackers and the like. Not only did the OS offer reliable hardware autodetection, but the Auditor team went through a lot of trouble to add run-time autoconfiguration to many of the included tools (think: no more editing kismet.conf).

This version of BackTrack will look very familiar to Auditor users. It preserves much of Auditor's look-and-feel, including the task-oriented launch menu that made it so easy to find the right tool for the situation. There are still an awful lot of tools available, though I haven't compared the lists to see which were added or dropped in the conversion to BackTrack.

While the old Auditor releases were monolithic CD images, BackTrack is based on the SLAX Slackware LiveCD, and now offers easy GUI-based ISO customization. This was originially a feature of WHAX/SLAX. This customization feature makes it easy to create a specialized BackTrack ISO for whatever you have in mind.

For example, even though the beta was just released today, I found that there were already three patches available. You read that right: patches for a LiveCD ISO. I downloaded the three module files from the BackTrack website as well as the Windows-based SLAX customization tool, MySLAX Creator. Within about 1 minute, I had remastered the ISO to include the new patches. Sure enough, at boot time it recognized the additional modules and loaded them into the running image.

Although the software on the beta release is not itself modularized, this is planned for the future, giving users the ability to strip out things they won't need. Users can already create additional modules to add to their ISO images, and I may try this with the Sguil and InstantNSM software.

Tomorrow, I hope to find time to play with some of the included tools some more, especially the bluetooth utilities. In the meantime, if you're at all interested in a security tools LiveCD, you really should give BackTrack a try.