There have been many arguments about why backtrack didn't need to release a 64 bit distro over the years. The fact is backtrack was never really designed to become what it did but it is and with recent developments should remain to be the choice for penetration testers.
One of my biggest problems with using backtrack as a main OS rather than a VM in recent years was the fact that I really couldn't support a full range of virtual machines with the kind of power I wanted. An example of this would be major virtual networks to test various attack scenarios on the fly. We are very spoiled these days with easy access to massive amounts of high speed memory and multiple core processors capable of supporting 4 or more virtual machines with ample resources. It was easy enough to modify the kernel in backtrack 4 to support large amounts of memory as I demonstrated months ago in this very blog, but it still only allowed us access to 4GB or less per process.
With the amazing power of CUDA and GPU processing power becoming more cost effective, I have to admit I found myself amazed at the power demonstrated by PureHate and the HashCat team but still longing for large amounts of memory after brute-forcing 7 character passwords with only my humble Alien-ware M11X Net-book.
With the new organization of the backtrack team and a proper development environment along with source code to modify I can only daydream about the fun to come with perhaps a newly built computer and a fully capable server version of backtrack.
It was a wonderful James Bond like tool when I first started using backtrack-2, I found it perfect on a thumb-drive with persistent changes and encryption. As we have all advanced and hardware and cloud-computing resources have become affordable extending the possibilities, lets look ahead and start working on our Pen-Testing Servers to go along with our pocket spy-kits.
I look forward to working with everyone from 304Geeks on some very interesting and even still unimagined implementations of backtrack.
A small update on the cloud based web development lab:
I spend a great deal of time working out a number of issues, building attack labs and web-development test beds. I had a very difficult time tying to figure out how to implement these projects for 304geeks with as little cost as possible to me.
After a great deal of trial and error I have decided to just roll out a mass amount of CMS, Blog, wiki, shopping cart and various commonly used web management systems. brief examples are joomla, wordpress, ZenCart Twiki, MediaWiki and several others.
I will be opening it up to 304 geeks only and take the necessary steps to ensure that these test beds can be used for those interested in web-development practice as well as penetration testing.
I only ask that we keep it clean and within the domains I own without affecting other or crossing boundaries that for obvious reasons are problematic. My hope is we can turn some of my wasted web-space I have acquired from some of my more ambitious endeavors into something helpful and constructive for the group.
contact me again through e-mail and I will replay with more info.
hopefully we can branch this out into bigger things down the road.
