Backtrack 4 Final

Backtrack is a linux distribution used mainly for penetration testing and forensic. It is originated from two formerly competing distribution : WHAX and Auditor Security collection. Although it has been specially designed for pentesting, many people use it as their main OS.

Backtrack 4 is currently its latest release and is available as a LiveDVD, but it can also be installed on you hard disk or vmware machine.

Download link :

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/

For this post I have used VMware Player which is free.

Tools:

Backtrack contains more than 300 tools ready to be used. With these you are able to perform various task such as sniffing, information gathering, network monitoring, scanning vulnerable ports, sql injections, exploiting, tunneling, spoofing, both online and offline password cracking, etc..

A large number of people make use of Backtrack for the specific purpose of cracking wep keys on a wireless network. I am not against that, but don’t forget that Backtrack  has many functions besides wep cracking.

Some popular tools are : Nmap, FastTrack, MetaSploit, OpenVas, Aircrack-ng,aireplay-ng, Wireshark, Ethercap, Hydra and John The Ripper.

For those who want to try it here is how to activate your ethernet connection. ( assuming you use myT)

In console :  start-network

Or : /etc/init.d/networking start

Tips:

To list all your wireless devices  type : iwconfig

To list  you networks interfaces type : ifconfig

eth0 is your primary network interface, to activate it type : ifconfig eth0 up