Turning the OLPC Into a Hacker’s Toolkit - Give One, Get Owned, Part 2
- Building a Basic Hacker Toolkit
- Adding Nessus and Metasploit
- Wireless Sniffing on the XO
- Conclusion: Give One, Get Owned
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
The OLPC project's XO is a cute little green computer that was designed for extreme conditions and novice users. But don't let its appearance deceive you. What appears to be a solution meant to provide an educational stimulus to the children in a third world country might just be so much more.
In Part 1, we illustrated how to tweak the OLPC into a personalized machine that provides a solid foundation for all your hacking dreams. With that accomplished, we will now go one huge step further and turn that passive XO into a true Lean Green Hacking Machine.
Building a Basic Hacker Toolkit
The following series of steps will help you convert your plain old boring OLPC into a device with the potential to own the world. Although we can assure you that the programs we'll mention are used by hackers and crackers worldwide, we won't be providing the required information you'll need to effectively use these programs. So, we highly recommend that you look to external sources (if needed) to expand your knowledge base to fully understand the impact that the highlighted programs can have on the networks and systems they are used against.
The first thing we need to do is install the core suite of tools that traditionally make up a hacker's toolkit, taking away all shreds of remaining innocence from your XO. When you're done with this section, your OLPC will contain enough tools to take on most any network!
Here are the easy-to-install yet essential tools that you can quickly get up and running on the XO, and instructions for installing them.
- Netcat. Netcat is the hacker's Swiss Army knife of tools. In the right hands, it can do scanning, probing, testing, tunneling, and much more. To install, just type yum install nc.
- nmap. The first choice for network mapping. Everyone uses nmap. Even Trinity from The Matrix uses it. You need to use it. To install, just type yum install nmap.
- Zenmap. Though nmap can be a great tool, knowing all those flags and correctly typing them in can be annoying. To simplify things, you need Zenmap, the GUI interface for nmap! To install, type wget http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/zenmap-4.53-1.noarch.rpm at a shell prompt as root. Then install the file with the command rpm –iv zenmap*rpm.
- Nikto. Nikto is a web application vulnerability scanner. It admittedly does lead to numerous false positives, but using this tool against a website can save a lot of manual testing and probing. To install, just type yum install nikto.