In 2005, WHoppiX evolved into WHAX, with an expanded and updated toolset, based on “the more
modular SLAX (Slackware) live CD.” Muts and a growing team of volunteers from the hacker com-
munity seemed to realize that no matter how insightful they were, they could never anticipate all
the growth and fluctuation of our industry and that users of their CD would have varied needs in
the field. It was obvious that Muts and his team were actually using WHAX in the field, and they
seemed dedicated to making it work. This was encouraging to me.
In 2006, Muts, Max Moser, and their teams consolidated Auditor Security Linux and WHAX into
a single distribution called BackTrack. Still based on SLAX, BackTrack continued to grow, adding
more tools, more frameworks, extended language support, extensive wireless support, a menu
structure catering to both novice and pro users, and a heavily modified kernel. BackTrack became
the leading security distribution, but many like me still used it as a backup for their ”real tools.”
By early 2009, Muts and his team had extended BackTrack significantly to BackTrack 4. Now a full-
time job for Muts, BackTrack was no longer a live CD but a full-blown Ubuntu-based distribution
leveraging the Ubuntu software repositories. The shift marked a serious evolution: BackTrack 4
had an update mechanism. In Muts’ own words: “When syncing with our BackTrack repositories,
you will regularly get security tool updates soon after they are released.”
This was a turning point. The BackTrack team had tuned into the struggles facing pen testers,
forensic analysts and others working in our industry. Their efforts would save us countless hours
and provide a firm foundation, allowing us to get back into the fight and spend more time doing
the important (and fun) stuff. As a result, the community responded by flocking to the forums
and wiki; and by pitching in on the dev team. BackTrack was truly a community effort, with Muts
still leading the charge.
BackTrack 4 had finally become an industrial-strength platform and I, and others likeme, breathed
a sigh of relief. We knew firsthand the “pain and sufferance” Muts and his team were bearing,
because we had been there. As a result, many of us began using BackTrack as a primary foundation
for our work. Yes, we still fiddled with tools, wrote our own code, and developed our own exploits
and techniques; and we researched and experimented; but we did not spend all our time collecting,
updating, validating, and organizing tools.
BackTrack 4 R1 and R2 were further revisions in 2010, leading to the ground-up rebuild of Back-
Track 5 in 2011. Still based on Ubuntu, and picking up steam with every release, BackTrack was
now a massive project that required a heroic volunteer and community effort but also funding.
Muts launched Offensive Security (in 2006) not only to provide world-class training and penetra-
tion testing services but also to provide a vehicle to keep BackTrack development rolling, and
ensure that BackTrack remained open-source and free to use.
BackTrack continued to grow and improve through 2012 (with R1, R2, and R3), maintaining an
Ubuntu core and adding hundreds of new tools, including physical and hardware exploitation
tools, VMware support, countless wireless and hardware drivers, and a multitude of stability im-
provements and bug fixes. However, after the release of R3, BackTrack development went rela-
tively, and somewhat mysteriously, quiet.
XIII
Preface
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