The developers of the Debian-based Parrot Security OS distribution have announced today, March 8, 2017, the general availability of version 3.5 of the ethical hacking and penetration testing oriented OS.
The Parrot Security OS 3.5 release comes a little over two months after the first and also the last maintenance update to the Parrot Security OS 3.4 series, and includes quite some improvements and new features, starting with native VirtualBox and VMware virtual machine guest support and the latest, long-term supported linux 4.9.13 kernel.
"This update took a lot of time (2 months) as we have not only updated and tested many many packages from Debian, but we also tried to play with some new features and dropped some old and obsolete ones," reads today's announcement . "On a brighter note, native VirtualBox and VMware guest support is now included by default."
Here's what's new in Parrot Security OS 3.5Prominent new features included in Parrot Security OS 3.5 are out-of-the-box printing support via the latest CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) drivers, experimental support for the Cinnamon desktop environment, re-implementation of the ZuluMount mount utility for zuluCrypt, and the Cryptkeeper encrypted folders manager tool.
Additionally, it comes with virt-manager, an KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and LXC (Linux Containers) virtual machine manager, the SiriKali graphical tool for managing folders encrypted with eCryptfs, EncFS, CryFS, SecureFS, or GocryptFS, as well as an on-board virtual keyboard.
Of course, numerous of the security tools included in the distribution have been updated to their latest versions, and many other that weren't available until now have been included. Parrot Security OS 3.5 also ships with the security updates released upstream for Debian Testing (Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch") and Debian Sid.
It is also worth mentioning that the Mozilla Firefox 45 ESR web browser was replaced with Firefox 51, which comes with up-to-date security fixes and plugins, as well as improved and clean default configs. The gtkdialog, penmode, airmode packages have been removed from this release, including their dependencies.
Download Parrot Security OS 3.5 in Full, Lite, Netboot, and Studio editions.