PHLAK

There have been many posts, on many blogs for a long time now regarding top LiveCD’s for penetration testers which help with penetration testing.

But, the problem is that those posts are seldom updated and the new livecd’s or the livecd’s that do not exist are not written about ever. Hence my post.

1. BackTrack:

BackTrack most definately is one of those livecd’s which is a favourite for most of penetration testers out there. Currently BackTrack consists of more than 300 different up-to-date tools which are logically structured according to the work flow of security professionals. No other commercial or freely available analysis platform offers an equivalent level of usability with automatic configuration and focus on penetration testing! With a new beta released recently, interest has gone up for this OS. With no installation whatsoever, the analysis platform is started directly from the CD-Rom and is fully accessible within minutes.

Download it here.

2. nUbuntu:

Why? Because it was recently updated, in December 2008 to be precise. The main goal of nUbuntu is to create a distribution which is derived from the Ubuntu distribution, and add packages related to security testing and remove unneeded packages. You can download it via torrents and via http/ftp mirrors as well.

Download: http://nubuntu.org/downloads.php

3. Network Security Toolkit (NST v1.8.1)

This bootable ISO live CD/DVD is based on Fedora. The toolkit was designed to provide easy access to best-of-breed Open Source Network Security Applications and should run on most x86 platforms. The main intent of developing this toolkit was to provide the network security administrator with a comprehensive set of Open Source Network Security Tools. The majority of tools published in the article: “Top 100 Security Tools” by insecure.org are available in the toolkit. On 2009-Jan-08 the latest NST release: v1.8.1, based on Fedora 8 using the Linux Kernel “2.6.26.8-57.fc8″ was released.

A short mash up of the features of this toolkit include: Wireshark based Network Packet Capture that can capture from 4 interfaces at a time, a Snort IDS based implementation supporting multiple network interfaces, a Snort IDS Collector, a Web-Based Front-End To nmap, a Web-Based Front-End To ntop, a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) Server Session Manager , a WPA-PSK Wireless Configuration, a Minicom Access Terminal Server and it also monitors RS-232-C Serial Communication data that is transmitted between two serial devices.

Download it here.

UPDATE: We have added two more livecd’s to the top list.

4. The OSWA Assistant:

The OSWA™-Assistant is a no-Operating-System-required standalone toolkit which is solely focused on wireless auditing. As a result, in addition to the usual WiFi (802.11) auditing tools, it also covers Bluetooth and RFID auditing. Using the toolkit is as easy as popping it into your computer’s CDROM and making your computer boot from it!

Download it here.

5. NetSecL:

NetSecL Linux is by default with hardened configuration leaving the distribution at a security level where it is still usable and providing the tools needed to test your security. GrSecurity and it’s firewall are features that makes the distribution unique along with specially compiled packages:

• runnable on i486 up to 64 bit machines
• with GCC Stack Smashing Protection
• compiled with binutils that supports PT_PAX_FLAGS

Download it here.

Thats it! We end it here! Why? Because the other liveCD’s are either too old or are not updated at all!

But, yet, they will be mentioned here for their contribution to the community:

Operator – http://www.ussysadmin.com/operator/
PHLAK – http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/phlak/?fl=p
Auditor – http://www.remote-exploit.org/index.php/Auditor_mirrors
L.A.S Linux – http://localareasecurity.com/download
Knoppix-STD – http://www.knoppix-std.org/download.html

Tagged as: BackTrack, computer forensic, Knoppix, Knoppix-STD, L.A.S Linux, livecd for penetration testing, livecd for pentest, NetSecL, NetSecl Linux, Network Security Toolkit, NMAP, NST v1.8.1, ntop, Operator, Operator LiveCD, PHLAK, Snort IDS, The OSWA Assistant, WireShark

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