The time has come to refresh our security tool arsenal – BackTrack 5 R3 has been released. R3 focuses on bug-fixes as well as the addition of over 60 new tools – several of which were released in BlackHat and Defcon 2012. A whole new tool category was populated – “Physical Exploitation”, which now includes tools such as the Arduino IDE and libraries, as well as the Kautilya Teensy payload collection.

Building, testing and releasing a new BackTrack revision is never an easy task. Keeping up-to-date with all the latest tools, while balancing their requirements of dependencies, is akin to a magic show juggling act. Thankfully, active members of our redmine community such as backtracklover and JudasIscariot make our task that much easier by actively reporting bugs and suggesting new tools on a regular basis. Hats off to the both of you.

We would like to thank Offensive Security for providing the BackTrack dev team with the funding and resources to make all of this happen. Also, a very special thanks to dookie, our lead developer – for building, testing and packaging most of the new tools in this release.

Together with our usual KDE and GNOME, 32/64 bit ISOs, we have released a single VMware Image (Gnome, 32 bit). For those requiring other VM flavors of BackTrack – building your own VMWare image is easy – instructions can be found in the BackTrack Wiki.

Lastly, if you’re looking for intensive, real world, hands on Penetration Testing Training – make sure to drop by Offensive Security Training, and learn the meaning of “TRY HARDER“.