ArchAssault is an Arch Linux based penetration testing distribution for security professionals and hackers. The distribution is a DVD size .iso available for 32 and 62 bit as well as the ARM architecture, a set of instructions for mobile devices.
This distribution comes with many development tools like Emacs, Cmake and Netbeans, basic graphic and text editing software, like Abiword and Videolan, with a strong diversity of hacking tools like WireShark, OphCrack, port scanner Zenmap and the usual hacking software used to fingerprint and attack a server or computer. If you want to secure hijacked data packets during your penetration testing Truecrypt is included to create encrypted conatiners, and for anonymous Internet browsing you can find Tor and Vidalia, a graphical user interface to manage Tor.
Penetration testing distribution ArchAssault
ArchAssault is using the lightweight OpenBox window manager, a minimalist front end with no Start button, tools can only be accessed right clicking on the desktop, this will not alter usability but it could be awkward at the beggining if you are not habituated to run your operating system this way. You can install any Arch Linux package in ArchAssault, if you don´t like OpenBox, it can be replaced with KDE.
One of ArchAssault’s developers hails from a similar distribution called BlackArch and you will find many concurrences in between them, the only differences appear to be minor tool variations.
ArchAssault can also be used for computer forensics acquisition, incorporating fatback to recover data from FAT file systems and stegdetect to uncover hidden steganographic messages inside images. ArchAssault developers keep adding bleeding edge hacking tools and they have recently introduced a heartbleed honeypot script to log attempts to exploit the recently found Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.