Pranitha Koya

PHLAK

PHLAK, the Professional Hacker's Linux Assault Kit, is a derivative of Morphix. Due to Morphix's modular nature, users can add their own personal tools/settings using mini-modules instead of having to rip the entire CD apart. All of the development features of Morphix are also available in PHLAK.

"We have also added the educational aspect to PHLAK. Users can browse documentation to learn about security and how to use tools," explains Shawn Hawkins, co-developer and Webmaster of PHLAK. The documents under /usr/share/doc take about 118 MB of space. There's information on various security tools, grouped into 13 categories that include analysis, auditing, scanning, and tunneling. There's also information on buffer overflows, firewalls, intrusion detection, and lots more. "Another thing we added back with 0.2-1 was XPde, which we dubbed 'sneaky.' We call it sneaky for the obvious reason (hacked with a disguised Linux distro). Of course we also add our own personal touch, the overall theme, extra tools, etc.," says Hawkins.

The currently-under-development version 0.3 has the new Morphix base and the 2.6 kernel. Hawkins also promises better wireless support, Morphix's new hard drive installer, more documentation, and new security tools.

Hawkins also talks about including a new filesystem in future PHLAK releases, called unionfs, that will allow users who boot from the CD to write to the filesystem. This won't save their information to the CD, but it will allow apt-get upgrade to work, nessus plugins update, and anything else that would require write access to the filesystem.


Figure 4. Documentation in PHLAK
Documentation in PHLAK

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reference:

 http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-livecdsec/