BackTrack has always been a popular choice when it comes to security and penetration testing. This open source distro has gained a lot of popularity and was rolled till version 5 with frequent changes to the variants. This project from Offensive Security has been moved from Ubuntu to Debian and the operating system is now renamed as Kali Linux. If you have installed a fresh copy of Kali Linux, then you might have noticed some awesome security and penetration tools under Kali Linux drop down menu list. These tools are powerful and yet efficient to use.
If you go through the menu list of security tools, you might have noticed that few like Wireless Attacks, Forensics and Reverse Engineering is added, which is quite impressive. One more section has been added in the list, ie Hardware Hacking. One more thing that you would be happy to see is Arduino kit on the list. Arduino is a single-board microcontroller designed to make the process of using electronics in multi-disciplinary projects more accessible. The hardware consists of a simple open source hardware board designed around an 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, though a new model has been designed around a 32-bit Atmel ARM. The software consists of a standard programming language compiler and a boot loader that executes on the microcontroller. The Forensic tools added were also quite impressive, thus making Kali Linux a complete security distro.
Another good option when it comes for the pen testing point of view was Stress Testing. Rather than checking out for different tools over the internet, tools have been provided for stress testing.
Though InfoSec professionals setup their own machines as per as their requirements. But Kali Linux is a complete InfoSec ased distro that gives you versatile features under one distro. The distro can be downloaded from the official page. ARM option gives power to tablet users this time.
