Philosophical thoughts about BackTrack 4

Many people have asked me why we chose a Debian base (*buntu) for BackTrack 4. One person even asked in dismay "Ubuntu ?? That's for noobs!".

The reasoning is simple.

Last year the Defcon people were tracking User Agents on their network, and I was astounded by the massive use of BackTrack throughout the con. What many didn't know is that everyone running BackTrack was potentially vulnerable due to a flaw in wget which was discovered a few weeks earlier.

This is only an example of course. The main point being, that with over 3 million users that downloaded BackTrack, none were receiving any security updates or patches as they came out. The distribution was not maintained.

With fortune 500 and government agencies using BackTrack as their main testing platform, we felt compelled to address this situation by making BT4 a real distribution with security and tool updates. This literally lifts BackTrack 4 from a LiveCD to a full blown Distribution.

At the end of the day, Linux is a kernel with user space applications around it. The alignment of these applications is what distinguishes one distribution from another.

Oh, and here's a screenshot of aircrack-ng cracking WPA at 1400+ keys per second using a Pico card on BT4 Beta :)


For more Pico action shots, click here: http://secmaniac.blogspot.com/2009/01/cracking-wpa-at-speed-of-pico.html