Friday, May 11, 2012

Review: BackBox linux 2.05 - the ethical hacking tool

From distrowatch I found about this Ubuntu derivative and a little bit of research actually tempted me to download and test the distro. I know it won't be a fair review from my side as I am no where even close to ethical hacking business. But, it may interest the readers of this blog - hence, a review.

Look and feel-wise, it is similar to Xubuntu, as both share the XFCE window manager. 


Software repository is almost similar except for the "ethical hacking" part. However, it is based on Ubuntu 11.04, Linux kernel 2.6.38 and Xfce 4.8.0. Xubuntu 11.04 would be the fair comparison for it. 

The most tempting part is the Auditing and servicing part which has cool tools for "Hacking". You can see the tools in the picture below.


On booting from pen-drive, CPU usage is 9% and RAM usage 182 MiB. I am writing this blog from the BackBox only.

It has cool black & blue interface and the OS works really smooth in my system. I hardly feel that it is not actually installed in my system, rather running from a 4 GB pen-drive.

Ethical hacking tool-wise I am not an expert. But given the diagram above, it seems to have it all what hackers actually need. Based on user point of view, it works really smooth with in-built flash support, Sun java installed and typical Xubuntu 11.04 softwares loaded. Truly, a smart distro to use.

However, one concern I have is - from Oct'12 there won't be any support for Ubuntu 11.04 or Natty. So, won't the support for this distro end there as well? Possibly the developers might be able to answer, if they provide continued support for it even after Ubuntu support is over.

You can download the image from:


http://www.backbox.org/downloads

It has both Intel i386 and amd-64 versions. You can download the iso directly if you have fast internet, else you can download via torrent. 

1 comment:

  1. Well, I too ain't no hacker of any sort, but I'll still share this cuz I know some of my noobs will love this. :)

    ReplyDelete