Hello, I'm new to the field and wondering what everyone's opinion's are on platforms. Do you prefer Backtrack, Kali or other? Also if I am just starting out should I go with the newest tools available? i.e Kali or start with backtrack first? Any advice is welcome. Sorry if this is in the wrong location.

Hi n37sh@rk!

Welcome to the field! In terms of platforms Backtrack or Kali should be fine to get you started, DragonGeorge makes a good point BT support will be ending eventually.

My recommendation is to make a live CD of Kali and try it out for awhile, get the lay of the land and learn about the tools. I found that the best way to learn was to use BT for awhile, and then create my own platform (use a base OS and install the tools on your own). This helped me to learn dependencies, etc that I wouldn't have learned with everything pre-installed.

Best of luck!

Kali for me seem to have some bugs so I don't really use this.

If you want easy life then BT5 as it has all tools and you don't need to worry about install new tools.

If you want a challenge and want to learn more about Linux I would say Ubuntu or any other linux OS where you need to install tools from scratch as it give you experience working with the system and fixing things when they break.

Ive been using both for about 2 weeks and the Debian interface with Kali just seems more functional to me at least. Could just be because i'm a n00b. I like the idea of using a base and then installing the tools you need rather than having an out of the box solution.

Backtrack is no longer supported. While that doesn't mean it's useless, if you're just starting out, I recommend using a distribution that's supported so you can get some help when the time comes. My preference is currently with Kali, but there are other alternatives such as Pentoo and Backbox. You could even use any distribution and just pick the tools you need. Pentesting distributions typically pack a lot of tools in them, but you're probably going to use only a small handful, so you can just install those on your own distribution of choice.

I've heard that they will be updating the course but as for when, I have no idea. If you plan on taking PWB, and you're new to hacking, I would probably stick with Backtrack (despite what I said in my previous post). If
you've already got a handle on what tools to use to get things done, you can certainly use other distributions.

As I said, Backtrack is no longer supported so you may run into some walls when trying to fix things that don't work. Certain tools referenced in PWB no longer come preinstalled with Kali (eg: unicornscan, MinGW), although you can certainly install them yourself. In fact, I believe the course material uses Backtrack 4, and when I took it, 4 was no longer supported and I was using 5R3 so some things were already different then. As long as you do a bit of reading and research, you should be able to follow the course material without too many problems.

There are other Penetration Testing Linux Distros as well. I'm still using BT5 R3 mainly (whilst I'm studying for OSCP), although I'm also running Kali as well to a lesser extent.

Regarding the OSCP, the plan is to update the courseware.

However, until that happens I'd follow superkojiman's advice for now.

I have the v.3.3 courseware and it references BT5.