Bootable Linux distributions are quite popular right now. Just by booting from a DVD or other media, they allow you to possess a dedicated security auditing or forensics workstation.
Usually though, I don’t want to reboot just to use a different set of applications. I want all of my applications available to me all of the time.
I normally use Synaptic Package Manager to add each application to my Ubuntu system manually. This is time consuming, but eventually allows me to create a system with a rich set of security tools.
A better approach is to call apt-get directly. This is much quicker than using the Synaptic GUI. Then, all available Ubuntu security tools can be installed with one shell script.
secbox is that shell script. With a single command, secbox installs every Ubuntu security tool supported by apt-get. secbox isn’t sexy, but it is very convenient for me — and for pretty much anyone who uses their Ubuntu machine for security work.
