Once [Ruan] over at AndroidClone heard that Android devices were capable of running a full Linux environment, he started contemplating all of the things he might be able to do with a full Linux OS in his pocket.

He decided that a portable penetration testing platform would be great to have on hand, so he got busy installing Ubuntu 10.10 on his Lenovo LePhone. Once he had it up and running, he stripped out all of the unnecessary fluff and added some common tools such as Wireshark, Nmap, and Kismet, among others. He says it easily runs side by side with Android, allowing you to switch between the Ubuntu install and your standard Android applications with ease.

While this all started out as a proof of concept, he has continued to refine the project, releasing several new versions along the way. If you are interested in giving it a try, he has installation instructions available in the AndroidClone forums.

[thanks Stephen]

Inside this box you’ll find a La Fonera wireless access point. [Emeryth] and his band of miscreants built this portable device for WiFi security testing. The AP is running OpenWRT and has been set up to use the 16×4 character display as a terminal. An ATmega88 connects the LCD as well as six buttons to the UART of the La Fonera. From there, a set of Ruby scripts takes care of the communication protocol. As you can see after the break, this setup allows you to scan the area for WiFi, showing channel, SSID, and MAC information. Although not specifically outlined in the video we suspect there’s some more devious tricks up its sleeve too.

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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.