Comments on: Live Hacking CD vs. Backtrack 4

By: nick

nick — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:11:17 +0000

LHCD is not a superior disk.
As we can see, there are lots of missing tools in there unlike BT, it have many available tools and even some are rarely used, they are also updated.
I think as for now, no other pentesting distro could overcome backtrack unless the developers are pure geniuses.
I reviewed the tools in LHCD, its kinda really missing important tools. Like for penetration attacks like metasploit and other tools that are in BT.
By the way, LHCD is still a good distro.

By: gunma

gunma — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:08:56 +0000

@Wesley: thanks for giving up some spaces to comment
@Jason: yep “Offsec is a hard beast to take on”, techie should have bussiness skills as well to survive(and strive if possible) ..
and about Pentoo, since gentoo/pentoo is a rolling release you just need to upgrade it and voila! you are on “current”

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:21:24 +0000

Commenting to an old post, but thanks for the review Wesley. There have been a few attempts to “de-throne” Backtrack but none have really taken off. I have used and continue to use both Backtrack and Pentoo. Pentoo hasn’t seen an update for a while but i enjoy the underlying platform. There was one last year or so called Matruix which started off with lots of steams but just didnt have the dev time behind it. Really crating your own live CD with the tools you use is a very rewarding experience. I highly suggest it.

Offsec is a hard beast to take on… they have Backtrack, the Social-Engineering Framework, Exploit-db, and training. They are even moving into the CTF “space” and have been marketing the BT4 release pretty hard, especially at Blackhat. Makes sense, take over industry critical needs/functions and people will take your training first ($$$).

anyways, moving along….

By: gunma

gunma — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 06:25:18 +0000

Hi. nice posts.

i havent try LHCD (though i tried to download back while) stiil i get worry of upgradeability of it.

yet i stop looking for linux std after i got pentoo, bt makes me upset, i cant upgrade bt2 to bt3, bt 3 to bt4 etc, and the iso size is huge.
i think specialized distro must have a good base linux, after changing distro all the time i finally got stick to gentoo which is i assume a good base (good upgrades/docs/ etc)..

You can get pentoo packages on top of gentoo installation(layman -a pentoo etc.)
or get the livecd. pentoo eat less ram & use enlightenment for window manager.

Ian.

By: Wesley McGrew

Wesley McGrew — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:47:17 +0000

Backtrack specifically does not bring up interfaces on bootup, since most penetration testers don’t want to announce their presence on the network immediately. It allows the tester to bring the interfaces up in promiscuous or monitor mode to perform reconnaissance and information gathering before moving on to other phases of attack.

If you have no need for this, just modify the startup scripts to bring up the interfaces.

By: fixer

fixer — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:18:25 +0000

Mind if I chime in here? would be nice if the ethernet interfaces were allready active and ready with dhcp on bootup, seems sort of a hassle to have to manually enabled them thar features everytime you bootup.

By: Week 19 in Review – 2010 | Infosec Events

Week 19 in Review – 2010 | Infosec Events — Mon, 17 May 2010 06:27:19 +0000

[...] Live Hacking CD vs. Backtrack 4 – mcgrewsecurity.com Dr. Ali Jahangiri made claims that “Live Hacking CD is much easier than BackTrack and its tools are updated” [...]

By: Wesley McGrew

Wesley McGrew — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:29:25 +0000

I honestly don’t think that BackTrack 4 appears “big and daunting” to new users, and I don’t really see that as a good argument for having a smaller distribution. Every new user I’ve introduced to BackTrack has been pretty impressed and excited by the large number of tools, started with a handful, and worked their way into the others as-needed. It’s not as though you’re making them use all the tools at once.

By: Dantevios

Dantevios — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:17:17 +0000

Reply to Gary Sims:

Technically it has not been built from scratch. It is based of ubuntu’s 9.10 distro. It doesn’t offer hardly any tools that Backtrack doesn’t. And the main killer for me is that it doesn’t even come with the metasploit framework. Now I am all for people offering free security tools, but the reason I am saying they are knock offs is because they pretentious released a live cd for people to use without offering many new features and re-invented the wheel and made it a crappier wheel.

By: Leon

Leon — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:41:53 +0000

I prefer to install BT4 instead of live booting it. Most of the tools that come with BT4 are out -dated and need updating when you are going to use them. Using the fasttrack script (/pentest/exploits/fasttrack) saves a lot of time updating.