When you think of penetration testing (pentesting), the first thing that probably comes to mind is Kali Linux, and with good reason. Kali Linux is the de facto standard pentest OS because it comes with just about every tool you could imagine.

At the same time, because there’s so much to be found in Kali Linux, it can be a bit overwhelming. Granted, that’s kind of the nature of penetration testing because you really need to know what you’re doing.

Penetration testing is a common security practice. With pentesting, you act as an attacker of your own system, looking for all the different ways it can be compromised, using all the tools at your disposal.

But there’s another pentesting distribution, called HydraPWK2, that includes all of the necessary tools but offers them in a way that’s a bit easier to comprehend.

The reason I say this about HydraPWK2 is all about the menu structure on the desktop. What the distribution does is organize the desktop menu into easily understandable categories (Figure 1), such as Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover, Reconnaissance, Resource Development, Initial Access, Execution, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Evasion, Credential Access, Discovery, Lateral Movement, Collection, C2, Inhibit Response Function, Impair Process Control, Exfiltration, Impact, Forensic and Usual Applications.

Figure 1: The HydraPWK2 menu structure is very easy to understand.

Organizing the menu this way vastly simplifies how you get to know, understand and use this penetration testing distribution.

But what about the tools?

Yeah, a pentesting OS is only as good as the tools it contains, and HydraPWK2 has everything you need. I won’t go through the entire list of preinstalled applications, but suffice it to say that you probably won’t lack for tools. Just open the desktop menu and then open a category to see what tools are available. For example, go to Reconnaissance and you’ll see six subcategories (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Here you see the subcategories in the Reconnaissance menu, as well as three other entries.

Click Wireless Sniffing and you’ll find candump and hackrf_sweep. Keep in mind that (like with Kali Linux), many of these tools are of a command-line nature, so if a menu entry opens a terminal window, that’s where you’ll use the command. When the terminal window opens, many of the apps will also reveal helpful information about how to use the tool. For instance, the candump tool can be used like so:

1	candump -l any

That will create a log file for all network interfaces, and the file will be named candump-XXX.log, where XXX is the date and a time stamp. Even the version of nmap included with HydraPWK2 is the command-line version. There are some graphical user interface (GUI) tools, such as Maltego, which are very powerful but can also have an associated cost or at least require an account.

Because so many of these tools are command-line versions, you’ll need to have a pretty thorough understanding of how they work. To that end, I would highly recommend that you take the time to read through the documentation of each tool. Fortunately, HydraPWK2 has a good amount of information, collected in a single location.

Some of the tools, such as the Social Engineering Toolkit (SET), walk you through the process via a set of lists from which you choose options (Figure 3).

Figure 3: SET is a powerful tool that can run several types of campaigns.

The Nature of HydraPWK2

There’s one thing to keep in mind with HydraPWK2: You’re supposed to run it as a live distribution. However, the nice thing about this OS is that you can actually install it on a drive. To do that, go to Menu > Usual Applications > System > Install HydraPWK. This will open the Calamares installer (Figure 4), where you can walk through a fairly straight-up Linux installation.

Figure 4: The installation of HydraPWK2 should be familiar to anyone who’s installed Linux.

Although it’s probably easier to run HydraWPK2 as a live distribution, I decided to go ahead with the installation to see how well it worked. One of the reasons why I would suggest installing this OS is that it would allow you to save log files and view them at a later time. As well, you could also install other forensics tools if what you need isn’t found out of the box.

The installation of the OS took about as long as any Linux distribution (roughly 5 minutes). Once it was completed, I rebooted and logged in. After I logged in, I could run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade to make sure HydraPWK2 has all the latest software. That alone makes it worth installing, so I would suggest installing it on a spare system (like a laptop, so you can carry it around the company for various testing) and burning it to an ISO, so you have an even more portable option.

One of the things I appreciate about HydraPWK2 is that it uses a real-time Linux kernel. Keep in mind that a real-time Linux kernel ensures that time-sensitive tasks are executed within strict time constraints, which can be important when running tools for penetration testing.

I would recommend you give both Kali Linux and HydraPWK2 a try and see which one better suits your needs. I found HydraPWK2 to be fairly simple to use (so long as you know how to work with the pentesting tools) and the Xfce desktop not to get in the way of the work.

Grab an ISO of HydraWPK2 from the official download site.

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