Penetration testing and ethical hacking have risen in popularity and industry needs over a previous couple of decades. From learning about the dangers of the internet to protecting data from hackers, the software industry has become increasingly aware of the millions of dollars that could be lost in a breach.
Similar to Kali Linux, Parrot Security OS was created as an operating system for ethical hackers to raise awareness even further. It is a free and open-source Linux distribution based on Debian.
Parrot security team recently released Parrot 5.0, declaring it “a huge milestone for the project,” so, without further ado, letโs quickly look at whatโs new.
What’s New in Parrot 5.0
A new Long-Term Support release mechanism is introduced in Parrot 5.0. In addition, all of the core systemโs packages are now based on Debian Stable rather than Debian Testing, ensuring no significant changes for at least two years.
The new LTS strategy ensures lightning-quick security updates. As a result, Parrot 5.0 and future versions are suitable for mission-critical situations, such as servers, where security is crucial.
The latest Linux 5.16 kernel version is used in Parrot 5.0, providing the highest performance and device compatibility. In addition, it comes with a large number of pre-installed drivers that make the system compatible with a wide range of hardware, including most wifi dongles.
Among other noteworthy changes, this release introduces the brand new Parrot Architect & IoT edition to maximize the system’s customizability. It is a minimal ISO file of Parrot that provides the installer only.
This means that this edition comes without anything pre-installed, and you can install any software and desktop environment on it. Therefore, establishing a whole desktop system requires an internet connection or a local mirror.
Parrot 5.0 includes four IoT tarballs, one for each architecture Parrot supports (amd64, i386, arm64, and armhf). They can be used to create new products such as WSL and WSL2 containers and integration with common cloud providers.
Apart from those mentioned above, Parrot 5.0 comes with various container solutions for leveraging sophisticated orchestration tools in complicated pentest situations.
Furthermore, Parrot’s Cloud Edition, Parrot for Docker, enables users to use the Parrot tools on top of other operating systems or in cloud environments.
Of course, without adding new security tools, Parrot never launches an update for the new version, and the latest Parrot 5.0 update contains nine of them:
- Pocsuite3
- Ivy-optiv
- Python3-pcodedmp
- Mimipenguin
- Ffuf
- Oletools
- findmyhash 2.0
- Dirsearch
- Pyinstxtractor
For detailed information about all changes in Parrot 5.0, you can refer to the official announcement.
Download
The developers of Parrot OS strongly recommend that you download the latest version and perform a new installation. This will make the system cleaner and more reliable.
However, you can still perform a complete system upgrade from Parrot 4.11 to 5.0 by running the following command:
sudo parrot-upgradeThen reboot the computer and repeat the upgrade process.
The first upgrade will prepare the system and install the new repositories, while the second upgrade will complete the full version jump, except for the user configs in the home folder.
