BackTrack 3, put on by the amazing folks at Remote-Exploit, has grown to become the industry standard for a complete Linux penetration testing (aka “hacking”) platform. BackTrack 2 was the first real release of the distro back in March 2007 and was built off a combination of WHAX and the Auditor Security Collection. The system has grown since then but has remained very configurable on the user-end, with a lot of support for customizable scripts and custom kernels. BackTrack aims to be quick and effective. Backtrack provides a thorough pentesting environment which is bootable via CD, USB or the network (PXE). The tools are arranged in an intuitive manner, and cover most of the attack vectors.
If the Live CD method does not appeal to you, you can always use BackTrack through a USB drive or just simply install in to your hard drive. If you go with the hard drive method, it only takes a measly 2.7 GB, so multi-boot systems should be very simple to get running with it. Now for a quick run down of what makes BackTrack 3 great: It has a massive list of penetration tools that can be put into thirteen nice categories (some highlights are listed below, but for a complete list check out The Official BackTrack 3 Wiki)…
Information Gathering: Nmbscan 1.2.4, PsTools, FingerGoogle, FPort 2.0, various DNS tools
Network Mapping: Hping, Netcat 0.7.1, Nmap, Unicorn Scan
Vulnerability Identification: various Cisco tools, OpenSSL Scanner, SMB suite, SQL Inject & Scanner
Penetration: Frameworks 3, Milw0rm archive
Privilege Escalation: Etherape, Hydra, ICMP tools, John the Ripper, Mailsnarf, Medusa, Wireshark
Maintaining Access: Backdoors, HTTP Tunnel, Iodine, socat
Covering Tracks: Housekeeping
Radio Network Analysis: Air Crack suite, CowPatty, Kismet, MacChanger
Bluetooth: Bluesmash, ObexFTP, Redfang
VOIP & Telephony Analysis: SIP suite, Pcap suite
Digital Forensics: Autopsy, Mboxgrep, DCFLDD
Reverse Engineering: GDB suite, Hexdump, Hexedit
Services: SNORT
As if that wasn’t enough, the Remote-Exploit Forum has great tutorials and member-driven help to get you up and running with all these tools. Be sure to check out the official BackTrack IRC room at irc.freenode.net #remote-exploit. If you are in need of any immediate help, I’m sure someone there would be glad to assist you. Fair warning though, going onto a chat room or forum and asking very experienced people about “how to hack my neighbor’s wireless internetz” is not going to get you anywhere but banned. Discussing illegal uses of the above software and of BackTrack is strictly prohibited on their forums and IRC chat. Figure out how to do it yourself, or better yet, don’t do it at all. 
If you’re still interested after reading this go to Remote Exploit’s Download Page and get hooked up with the the .ISO file to burn your Live CD or to get the extended disc image for your USB drive. I recommend PowerISO to do the burn. Also, be sure to check out the BackTrack 3 Official Wiki for a ton of helpful information and even some “How To” articles. >=D
Enjoy...
