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Follow UsThis year instead of creating PCQ Linux from scratch, we have decided to go
with one of the most renowned LiveOS for penetration testing called Backtrack.
This has become the de-facto OS for security related tasks in last couple of
years. It consists of all popular hacking and vulnerability assessment tools.
Some tools which you would love in this distro are Metasploit and a front end
for it called FastTrack . We have also talked in detail about how to use such
tools in the pages to follow.
But, our main aim was not to provide an OS which is only useful for those who
are into penetration testing and security assessment. Rather our aim this time
was to create something which can be used by anybody in times of emergency. Such
as, let's say you lost your data or a partition and want to recover it. Or, your
network is under attack by a virus or a hacker and you want to counter it. Being
a LiveOS, you can carry it around and boot from any machines you wish you to.
So, to let Backtrack do all these we have put it on Steroids! And have added
10 fresh handpicked applications to it. These applications are essentially
either data recovery tools or Honeypots which were not there in Backtrack
natively. You can find the list of added applications in the table below.
| Applications | Description |
| myrescue | It is a recovery tool that recovers data that is still readable. It first retrieves data from undamaged areas and then moves on to damaged ones. |
| Nessus | It is a popular vulnerability scanner. The nessusd does the scanning and Nessus client shows vulnerabilities results to user. |
| LaBrea | LaBrea takes over unused IP addresses, and creates virtual servers that are attractive to worms, hackers, and other denizens of the Internet. |
| Arpwatch | Arpwatch is a tool that monitors Ethernet activity and keeps a database of Ethernet/IP address pairings. It also reports certain changes via email. |
| arpalert | This software is used for monitoring Ethernet networks. It listens on a network interface and catches all conversations of MAC address to IP request. |
| recoverjpeg | This is an open source tool to recover jpeg pictures from a file system image. It scans the filesystem image and looks for jpeg structures |
| Mundelete | It is a program to undelete files from Windows FAT system |
| nepenthes | Nepenthes is a low interaction honeypot like honeyd or mwcollect. It emulates vulnerabilities worms use to spread, and then it capture these worms. |
| Scrounge-ntfs | It is a data recovery utility for NTFS file systems. It reads each block on the hard drive and retreives the data from it |
| shoneypot | This program enables you to take services by configuring it to be executed through either xinetd or inetd. |