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Parrot Security (ParrotSec) released today Parrot 4.11 as the latest version of their security-oriented Debian-based distribution for penetration testing and ethical hacking.
Arriving more than seven months after Parrot 4.10, the Parrot 4.11 release is powered by the latest LTS (Long-Term Support) Linux 5.10 kernel series for better hardware support and includes up-to-date core components based on the stable Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system repositories.
While Parrot 4.11 ships with Linux 5.10 LTS as the default kernel, the team plans to upgrade the system to the recently released Linux 5.11 kernel series since Parrot follows a rolling-release model. But they did not provide a time frame for doing so, and if you install Parrot 4.11 make sure you keep it up to date.
Parrot is a security-oriented distro at its roots, so you can expect noticeable updates for your favorite penetration testing and ethical hacking tools. Included in the new release are Metasploit 6.0.36, Bettercap 2.29, as well as Routersploit 3.9.
Moreover, the Pompem exploit and vulnerability finder tool was patched by the ParrotSec team to use the new wpvulndb server and properly handle down services. Same goes for the Xspy X-windows keystroke sniffer tool, which was patched to prevent it from being executable on the host system.
Among other noteworthy changes, Parrot 4.11 adds support for the Fish and Zsh shells, updates both the KDE Plasma and Xfce editions with several improvements and bug fixes, and finally deprecates Python 2 support as the distro is now shipping with Python 3.9 by default.
ParrotSec devs also revealed the fact that they plan on releasing an LTS branch of the distribution in the near future, hopefully alongside the rolling-release version. The LTS edition promises stability over bleeding-edge features and will also re-introduce ARM support and init freedom.
“We will catch the opportunity of a new Debian release to convert the current branch into a Long Term Support branch with fewer updates for a very reliable user experience,” said the devs. “We are evaluating the idea of continuing to provide a Rolling Release branch along side the LTS one.”
A lot of cleanup was done as well in this release, and you can check out the release notes for more details on what was removed, revisited or replaced.
Parrot 4.11 is available for download right now from the official website as Home and Security flavors with the MATE, Xfce, and KDE Plasma desktop environments pre-installed. Since this is a rolling-release branch, existing users need only to update their installations to receive the latest kernel and package updates.
Last updated 3 years ago
