Parrot OS 4.11 comes with its own arsenal of penetration testing and security-related tools. It is developed by a team of security experts, Linux enthusiasts, and open source developers.
Parrot OS has a few different editions:
- Home Edition is a general purpose operating system. In other words, this edition is designed for daily use, privacy and software development. Of course, the Parrot Tools can be manually installed to assemble a custom and lightweithg pentesting environment.
- Security Edition is a special purpose operating system designed for Penetration Test and Red Team operations. Therefore it contains a full arsenal of ready to use pentest tools.
What’s new in Parrot 4.11
The most notable is that Linux 5.10 is now the default kernel of this new Parrot version. This means better hardware support for very recent hardware. The Parrot team plan to release Linux Kernel 5.11 as soon as possible as a later update.
Many old, broken and unmaintained tools was purged, and also revisited many of the existing ones. Parrot 4.11 provides cleaner metapackages, updated tools and a more consistent repository.
Previous Parrot versions used to have un-needed services shut down by default, but such services happened to re-enable randomly after system updates. In the new version the Parrot’s devs enforced some systemd rules to prevent this happening.
Certain tools used for Linux local privilege escalation represented a security hazard from Parrot’s point of view, so devs disabled and unarmed them.
KDE Plasma now works again as expected, and it was updated to provide a better look and feel. XFCE has been updated with several improvements and fixes.
Parrot now ships with Python 3.9. Python 2 is finally deprecated, and /usr/bin/python now points to /usr/bin/python3 by default. Parrot also includes Go 1.15. The default GCC version is 10.2.1.
Updates for penetration testers
- Metasploit framework was updated to 6.0.36, and we keep updating it weekly.
- Bettercap has finally been updated to 2.29, and 2.30 is coming very soon.
- Pompem was patched from Parrot team to properly handle down services and use the new wpvulndb server.
- Routersploit was updated to make it work with python 3.9.
- Xspy was patched to not be executable on host system.
- Fish and Zsh support is now available in our skel, including the latest zsh-autocomplete version.
How to upgrade from a previous Parrot version
Parrot OS is a rolling release distribution, and updates flow in the repo as soon as they prove to be stable and reliable. You don’t need to worry about downloading any new releases.
Version numbers are just tags that Parrot’s devs assign to the current state of the project every time there are enough updates accumulated in the repo to justify a refresh of the ISO files. In fact every Parrot version represents exactly a refresh of Parrot’s ISO files to collect all the updates together into something ready to install and properly tested.
You can upgrade an existing system via APT using the following command:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgradeOr head over to Parrot’s official download page when you’re ready to grab a copy of this free operating system.
