BackTrack

BackTrack is a very useful security distribution for various hacks (pentests, rev eng, audit, ...).

Installing

Best way to install is to have it on a USB key and boot from it.

Here are a few problems I encountered with BackTrack 3 and their accompanying solutions.

TOR

TOR is included in BT3 but lacks some components, ie tsocks. Here is how to fix it:

1. First compile tsocks

wget 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/tsocks/tsocks-1.8beta5.tar.gz?modtime=1035331200&big_mirror=0'
tar zxvf tsocks-1.8beta5.tar.gz
cd tsocks-1.8
./configure 
make
make install
cd ..
hash -r

2. Fix some links

ln -s /lib/libtsocks.so /usr/lib/libtsocks.so

3. Check your setup by connecting to a server where you have access and check if the origin is coming from a non-known IP

netstat -anp | grep <YOUR_IP>

Preservation & Persistance

When you do some system changes, you may want to have them always loaded by default during the next BT3 boot, so before rebooting you need to type this command:

dir2lzm "/mnt/live/memory/changes/" "/mnt/sda1/BT3/modules/changes.lzm"

If you want to cherry-pick which file to include in the changes.lzm file, it's a bit more tricky, for example to keep the tsocks installation, you need to:

cd /mnt/live/memory/changes/
tar zcvf /tmp/tsocks.tgz lib/ usr/man/ usr/bin/ usr/lib/libtsocks.so
cd /tmp/
mkdir keep
cd keep/
tar zxvf /tmp/tsocks.tgz
cd /tmp/
dir2lzm keep /mnt/sda1/BT3/modules/tsocks-1.8beta5.lzm
chmod a+rwx /mnt/sda1/BT3/modules/tsocks-1.8beta5.lzm

Then at next reboot, tsocks and only tsocks should still be there. You can use this to distribute a package for Backtrack, ready to be used by other people.

You can for example download this Tsocks-1.8beta5.lzm and drop it in your BT3/modules/ directory on your USB key and benefit from the fixed TORify / tscosk support in Backtrack3 :)