A relative newcomer to the scene, the first release of BackBox was back in September as a project of the Italian Open Soluzioni web community founded by Raffaele Forte. Now on its second major release, BackBox has grown rapidly and offers plenty of scope for both amateur and professional use.

Based on Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution, itself derived from Debian, the latest build of BackBox isn’t exactly bleeding-edge – it’s still using the 2.6 kernel tree in both the x86 and AMD64 flavours – but it does contain an impressive collection of tools. It’s also surprisingly slick; from its lightweight yet attractive Xfce desktop environment to its multi-language live CD boot menu – which includes a ‘forensic’ mode that works to prevent accidental writes to a host system’s drive that could jeopardise evidence gathering activities – BackBox exudes professionalism in an area that all too often goes for glitz and glamour in an effort to attract the ‘script kiddies.’