Parrot OS 7.4, the Debian-based security and privacy distribution, was released on October 3 with Linux 7.1.

AnonSurf 6.0

AnonSurf, Parrot’s tool for routing all system traffic through Tor, has been redesigned around systemd, which now handles starting, stopping, boot behaviour, and new Tor identities. The aim is more reliable DNS, firewall, IPv6, and Tor configuration, with interrupted sessions recovering automatically at boot. The command-line tool adds public IP and Tor status checks, JSON output, and Nyx monitoring.

Tuned images

New “tuned” ISOs target newer processors at the amd64v3 (and arm64 v8.2) level. Parrot says compression, cryptography, FFmpeg, NumPy, and OpenBLAS workloads benefit most. Standard images remain for older hardware.

Other changes

• Parrot Discovery, a first-run app for installing browsers, editors, chat, container, gaming, and privacy tools through APT and Flatpak
• Rocket 2.0, a container manager for security tools, now prefers rootless Podman and falls back to Docker with your approval
• arm64 ISOs and a first Orange Pi beta for the Orange Pi 5 Ultra
• KDE defaults moved under /etc/xdg, and Baloo indexing is off by default
• Updated tools including Metasploit 6.5.4, Bettercap 2.41.7, Certipy-AD 5.1.0, ffuf 2.2.1, and TheHarvester 4.10.1

Getting it

Parrot comes in Security, Home, and Core editions. Existing installations upgrade with sudo parrot-upgrade; new ISOs are on our Parrot OS 7.4 download page. As always with penetration testing tools, only scan systems you own or are authorised to test; our nmap guide covers the basics.