BackTrack (2006 - 2013)

2006 - 2013

dead

two security live cds merged in 2006 and became the thing everyone booted from a disc instead of installing. it carried the whole toolkit already configured, which is why it turned up in university labs and on machines that were not yours. offensive security rebuilt it on debian and released the result as kali linux on 13 march 2013, retiring the old name the same day. every tool inside it is still running under a different logo.

» see backtrack-linux.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. TTNet broadband arrived at the house around 2006, which is the same year BackTrack shipped its first release. Those two facts belong to one story. The standard setup in Turkey then was a DSL box with wireless switched on and WEP holding the door. honestly, wEP had been broken open since '01. BackTrack was the disc that turned that break into a menu item.

It came outta a merger. Max Moser had been building the Auditor Security Collection, which already carried something over three hundred tools sorted into categories. Mati Aharoni had been building a security live CD called WHAX, a rename of an earlier Knoppix-based effort of his own. The two projects covered identical ground, so they stopped covering it twice. The merged image went out on may 2006, named after a search algorithm.

i was not paying attention by then. anyway, what it removed was a week of work. Assembling a penetration testing toolkit by hand meant fighting dependencies on a machine you then had to keep clean. either way. backTrack replaced that with a bootable image where everything was already present and already talking to everything else. It ran on hardware you did not own, it left nothing behind when you pulled the disc out. either way. That property is why it showed up in university labs. back then. it is also why it showed up in rooms nobody wrote a report about.

~ the dossier ~

Born	26 may 2006, WHAX and Auditor merged
Peak	the default pentest distribution, version 5 R3 in august 2012
Killed	13 march 2013
Lifespan	just under seven years
Made by	Mati Aharoni and Max Moser, later Offensive Security
Killed by	its own rebuild, shipped as Kali Linux

~ how it landed ~

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i sort of was, backTrack 2 came in march '07 and BackTrack 3 in june 2008. but yeah, version 4 followed in january 2010, still built on Slackware by way of SLAX, still a live CD first and an installed system second. Version 5 arrived on 10 may '11 and moved the whole distribution onto Ubuntu, which turned it into a normal Linux system that a normal package manager could keep current (dont quote me on that). for whatever reason. BackTrack 5 R3 landed on 13 august '12 and nobody knew it was the last one.

i saw this from a distance, mostly. for some reason. Almost nothing in it was written by the people who shipped it. Aircrack-ng and Metasploit belonged to other projects with their own maintainers and their own release schedules.

more or less. What BackTrack contributed was the assembly: the decision about which four hundred tools go on the disc and in what order the menu presents them, plus the driver patches that made a cheap wireless card do monitor mode. by then. That is unglamorous work, and it is the entire product.

~ the unraveling ~

The Slackware years left a mess underneath. Tools had been dropped into the image by hand rather than packaged properly. there was no clean way to update one thing without touching the others.

there was no upgrade path between major versions at all. more or less. You reinstalled (if memory serves). For a distribution whose users were mostly professionals billing hours, reinstalling every eighteen months was a real cost with no argument behind it.

this part i kind of was not really around for, but anyway. really though, the move to Ubuntu in version 5 fixed half of that and exposed the rest (dont quote me on that). Once the base was a real distribution with a real package manager, the gap between how BackTrack managed its own tools and how Debian manages anything became impossible to ignore from the inside.

~ what it became ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. Offensive Security spent a year rebuilding it in private on top of Debian, with every tool packaged the way Debian packages things and a policy about who is allowed to put what in the repository (dont quote me on that). The result went out on 13 march 2013 at Black Hat Europe under the name Kali Linux, version 1.0, called Moto. back then. The announcement was not that BackTrack had a new release, it was that BackTrack was finished.

That is a gentler death than most things on this site get. The code kept running, the team kept working, the people moved over in a matter of months and mostly did not complain.

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