The team behind the BackTrack project announced today the release of BackTrack 4 Beta, boasting major changes and a great deal of new features. "The Remote Exploit Development Team is happy to announce the release of BackTrack 4 Beta. We have taken huge conceptual leaps with BackTrack 4, and have some new and exciting features. The most significant of these changes is our expansion from the realm of a Pentesting LiveCD towards a full blown "Distribution,"" the developers stated in the official release announcement.

BackTrack 4 Beta is now based on Debian packages and uses Ubuntu software repositories, this change allowing any updates that are deployed to be immediately applied.

Highlights of Backtrack 4 Beta:

· the Kernel was updated to version 2.6.28.1 bringing better hardware support;
· BackTrack 4 Beta can now be booted over a network, using PXE supported cards;
· SAINT EXPLOIT, a network vulnerability assessment tool, and MALTEGO 2.0.2, an open source intelligence and forensic app, are now included;
· the latest mac80211 wireless injection patches were applied along with speed improvements for rtl8187;
· Pico e12 and e16 cards are now 100% functional with native support, enabling BackTrack 4 to take advantage of everything these incredibly small devices have to offer;
· Unicornscan, an information gathering and correlation engine is fully functional and features a web front end and postgress logging support;
· RFID support;
· Pyrit CUDA support and many more new and updated tools.



About BackTrack

BackTrack is a very popular Linux live distribution that focuses on system and network penetration testing, featuring analysis and diagnostic applications that can be run right from the CD. BackTrack emerged from Whax and Auditor Security Collection distributions, using what was best from both in one complete solution.

You can download BackTrack 4 Beta right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.