[4] In March 2013, the Offensive Security team rebuilt BackTrack around the Debian distribution and released it under the name Kali Linux.

[5] The BackTrack distribution originated from the merger of two formerly competing distributions which focused on penetration testing: On January 9, 2010, BackTrack 4 improved hardware support, and added official FluxBox support.

[4] The overlap with Auditor and WHAX in purpose and in collection of tools partly led to the merger.

[4][9] BackTrack provided users with easy access to a comprehensive and large collection of security-related tools ranging from port scanners to Security Audit.

[10] Support for Live CD and Live USB functionality allowed users to boot BackTrack directly from portable media without requiring installation,[11] though permanent installation to hard disk and network was also an option.