This book describes the addition of a kind of hacking and penetration testing more evolved and sophisticated than traditional and wired personal computer approach. The idea behind of this book is a low power penetration testing using tiny and cheap computers.
Over the last four decades, computer chips have become smaller, cheaper and more powerful. This book introduce The Deck, one custom Linux distribution designed to run penetration testing in low power devices easily hidden. The low power devices, or beagles, mentioned are based on systems developed by the nonprofit BeagleBoard.org Foundation.
The book teachs the way to install a base operating system together with the hacking toolbox. It describes the hardware for these beagles in depth too. There are plenty of scripting listings and commands to support this stuff.
If you know about intrussion techniques, toolkits and methodologies to break in computer networks and services you will not find any new material here (wireless cracking, nmap, metasploit, etc) In my opinion the interesting content comes from the experience of the author running pen-testing and how he uses the beagles to support the cracking effort. In detail, he comments the best way to install, hide and remove those tiny devices along the pen-testing target. The aerial drone attack approach is a good example case of how the security perimeter is impacted too.
My favourite chapter in the book is related to powering The Deck. It covers power requirements and sources (wall, USB, battery and solar power). It offers the right figures and proper web links to buy hardware if you wish.
The book covers the design of several beagles attacking in tandem too. All this coordination is radio based (802.11 and 802.15.4)
On the negative side the book contains some aspects to improve related to visual content. It needs to improve the quality of some screenshots, it is not possible the reading of characters in console captures. Some graphics appears in color and other graphics appears in BW. It would be great if all graphics were showed in a coherent way. Lastly, some desktop screenshots were taken by camera instead of capturing or dumping the desktop screen properly.
In summary, I enjoyed the reading. You won’t find any new thing in the software side if you have experience with penetration testing, but you will be able to identify how a mobile and low power hacking can be used in your daily pen-tests. Reading this book you will add new techniques and tools (hardware and software) in your penetration toolset.
I found this book available here:
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