BackTrack

History

The BackTrack distribution originated from the Linux counterparts WHAX and Max Moser's Auditor Security Collection - "The Swiss Army Knife for security assessments". Both where focused on Linux-based penetration tests. While WHAX was packed with more features, Auditor was based on structure and stability. Auditor featured well-laid-out menus for its collection of over 300 tools for troubleshooting, network and systems-fortifying. Its user-friendliness resulted in enhanced usability for penetration testing which led to the formulation of the BackTrack security testing distribution. The Auditor Security Collection was a Live CD based on Knoppix.

WHAX, a name derived from White-Hat and SLAX, was a distribution designed for security tasks. WHAX emerged from Whoppix, a Knoppix-based security distro. When Whoppix reached version 3.0 it was renamed as WHAX, to reflect the change of parent distribution from Knoppix to SLAX. Customized by Mati Aharoni, a security consultant, WHAX made its central focus on penetration testing. WHAX made it possible to test and verify the security of a network from many computers located in various places.

The first real BackTrack release was available to the public in the early 2007. It was a major step in advance compared to all the other security penetration testing distros available. Through the years and the releases the distro became the standard as penetration testing toolkit all over the world. Major companies like SANS or even the FBI where using the CD-ROM as base for their work. The demand for such a tool-suite was immense. Release "pre-4" has been downloaded over 4'000'000 times. The IRC channels and also the E-Mail and Forum entries became larger and lager. The community became so big that Backtrack needed a lot of help from the community.

Now at the early 2010 BackTrack encounters again a major change......


So long, BackTrack!


As you might already noticed the world's most famous security Linux distribution has a new home: http://www.backtrack-linux.org.

Yeah, we did it, and yes it was fun! But like every good thing in life also BackTrack and Remote-Exploit.org have changed. The community around BackTrack has grown and new, young developers together with one of the core founders pushed the distro into a larger scope, while the team Remote-Exploit decided to go back to the basics: Researching and publishing of our new ideas and projects....

Back to fun!