BackBox 5
If you want to follow our features on security this month, BackBox is an ideal distro for you. It’s packed with a variety of tools for penetration testing, forensic analysis and all those other things beloved of wearers of monochrome hats. However, it’s also a good distro in its own right, because it’s based on Ubuntu. That gives it a solid and up-todate base onto which to build the security tools. The desktop is XFCE, which is lightweight without being too minimal, and enables you to get on with using the computer without getting in the way or making things difficult.
BackBox can be run directly from the DVD, or you can copy the ISO image from the DVD to a USB stick with dd for an even more portable version. Running directly from an ISO image means you can be sure that nothing gets changed or corrupted in the OS, which is always important but much more so on a security testing system. It is also possible to use an area of a USB stick as persistent storage, enabling you to preserve settings and data between boots. To do this, use the StartupDiskCreator tool from inside BackBox. Alternatively, you can boot from the CD and keep data on a separate USB stick. Either create a filesystem labelled casper-rw on the stick or create a file called casper-rw in the root of the stick. This will then be used for persistence data storage.
It’s also possible to install BackBox to your hard disk in the usual way. The installer provides an option to encrypt the whole installation and we did hit a slight problem here, at least when installed in a virtual machine. If you’ve set up an encrypted disk then you may see a splash screen asking for a password that doesn’t enable you to type anything. If this happens it’s safe to reboot and try again as, because this point BackBox hasn’t mounted any filesystems and so there’s no risk of corruption. When this happened the next time it asked for the password at a normal text prompt, and so all was well. We only saw this on a VM, so it may just be caused by the drivers used for the virtual hardware.
Login details: username backbox, and password is left blank.