There are many distributions oriented to security and pentesting, one of the most famous is Kali GNU / Linux, but there are more and of which we have talked in other articles of this blog, some of them very specific for certain tasks. But today we are going to apprehend you Parrot OS, a distro very similar to Kali.
Without a doubt Parrot OS could be a good alternative for Kali and others. The distribution has been created by a team of Italian hackers called FrozenBox, those who have paid special attention to adding a multitude of tools for pentesting, computer forensics, reverse engineering, anonymous browsing on the web and cryptography.
Parrot OS is based on Debian Stable, just like Kali GNU / Linux and therefore they have a good base from which to start to offer stability, performance and robustness. The desktop is MATE 1.8.1 and it comes with a 3.16.7 kernel in its latest version. It also has a theme called Circle as artwork with the typical “hacking green” tones to offer a pleasant environment.
When you open the menu, an endless number of tools are displayed that we can use, divided into sections to catalog them in an intuitive way. A section that draws attention is Anon Surf, with a script for surf the internet in a way anonymous with Tor and I2P, and that also integrates a program called anonsurf manager that is in charge of automatically closing the programs that it considers unsafe and cleaning the cache.
We find many similarities with Kali, the browser is the same, that is, Iceweasel, a lightweight browser based on Firefox and that can use TorChat or access the Pandora Box service. Of course you will find many other tools that you find in Kali, such as Metasploit, Aircrack-ng, Hydra, John, nmap, owas-zap, etc. If you fight with the terminal and prefer the graphic mode, there is good news, an app called AirMode is integrated, which is a GUI for Aircrack.
The same happens with Zenmap, a graphical environment for nmap that will make your life much easier when working and that was also present in Kali Linux. AND the list of tools could be endless, with a whole Swiss army knife for hacking at your fingertips that you can use in Live mode or install on your computer. By the way, the default password and user are also the same as in Kali, that is, "toor" and "root" respectively.
Very good I did not know it, it is very good that alternatives arise, no matter how good Kali Linux is, when there is competition they will never rest on their laurels.
It is also the beauty of linux / unix, that there are distributions and ways of doing things for everyone, not a window for everyone equally;).