The Isostick, a Kickstarter project now in development, is meant to emulate an optical drive in the form of a USB stick.  Although there is nothing new with putting an iso file (optical disk image) on a USB stick, what is unique about this drive is that it fully emulates a drive without actually having to worry about drivers or extra programs.

When plugged in, a computer sees a flash drive and a virtual optical drive.  An excellent feature is that this disk can store multiple “iso” files and select them with a built in utility program. This could be invaluable for a technician or hacker since more than one CD or DVD is often needed to complete a task.

If fully developed, one could expect to attach this “drive” to your keychain and not have to worry about lugging an optical disk around anymore. Also, the activity light is programmable, which is a nice bonus.

The Remote Exploit Development Team has just announced BackTrack 4 Beta. BackTrack is a Linux based LiveCD intended for security testing and we’ve been watching the project since the very early days. They say this new beta is both stable and usable. They’ve moved towards behaving like an actual distribution: it’s based on Debian core, they use Ubuntu software, and they’re running their own BackTrack repositories for future updates. There are a lot of new features, but the one we’re most interested in is the built in Pico card support. You can use the FPGAs to generate rainbow tables and do lookups for things like WPA, GSM, and Bluetooth cracking. BackTrack ISO and VMWare images are available here.