The story begins with two coffee drinkers from Longview, Texas. James Hartman and Shawn Hawkins were like any other Linux users, hitting Slashdot in the morning, researching numerous open source repositories, and experimenting with interesting projects. Always security minded, the two developers started looking at live security distributions. Never being completely satisfied with existing projects, the two started on a mission to create the most complete live security Linux distribution. So began the research. Instead of starting from scratch they decided to look at some of the other preexisting live CD distibution, finally settling on Morphix due to its modularity. After three months of development the initial version was released. Two moths later 0.2 was released with all fifteen pieces of flair.

PHLAK is designed as the security professional's tool kit. It is not meant to turn the unexperienced into a security guru overnight. However, anyone with the desire can learn from the included tools and documentation.

Like any good tool, PHLAK can be used by Sith or Jedi alike. Included in the distribution are all the mainstream tools such as: nmap, nessus, snort, the coronor's toolkit, ethereal, and several other security packages. Some of the other lesser known, yet equally effective, tools include: hping2, proxychains, lczroex, ettercap, kismet, hunt, achilies, brutus, and many others. Make no mistake, this is a real Linux distribution including many common services such as apache, mysql, ssh, iptables, and most other services that are included on any other standard distribution.

To make things more user-friendly, PHLAK currently includes two fast, light-weight window managers, XFCE4 (the default) and Fluxbox. From these window managers the user has easy access to the powerful documentation system. Currently included in the XFCE4 user interface are quick-start buttons to initiate services and different firewall settings for those who are command line impaired.