Summary

This chapter introduced you to the wonderful world of BackTrack, a Live DVD Linux distribution, specially developed to help in the penetration testing process.

We started this chapter with a brief history of BackTrack. Next, we moved on to see what functionalities BackTrack offers. BackTrack currently has tools to help you with penetration testing, and it also has tools for digital forensics and reverse engineering.

We then continue to describe how to get BackTrack and several ways to use it. We can use BackTrack as a Live DVD without installing it to the hard disk, or we can install it to the hard disk, and we can also use it as a Portable BackTrack by installing it to the USB flash disk.

Before we can do information security audit using BackTrack, we need to configure its network connection first, either through wired Ethernet or using wireless connection.

Like any other software, we also need to update BackTrack, either by updating the software applications or the Linux kernel included in the distribution. This update process is necessary in order for us to use the most stable version of the software.

Then we look at how to install additional information security tools not included by default in BackTrack 4.

At the end of the chapter, we discussed a method to create a customized BackTrack. This section is useful if you want to create your own version of BackTrack.

In the next chapter, we will look at the penetration testing methodology.