So picture this scene. You arrive at your favorite Starbucks, order your caramel iced latte, and sit down to Tweet about the benefits of a soy-based diet. Then suddenly you remember you left your Apple MacBook at home and all you have with you is your iPad. Travesty! But, what if there was a way to use this iPad for a higher purpose and you could pop all the shells you wanted from the comfort of an air-conditioned coffee shop, whilst looking trendy and hip.
Well, this article will talk you through everything you need to go from a basement-dwelling hacker to one who pays for over-priced coffee and looks cool. All you need to follow along is an iPad, an external keyboard, and access to a cloud provider to host your VPS. However, in this demo, I am using a local machine as my VPS.
Building your hacking VPS
To begin with, you need to ditch iPad OS and find something more suitable like Kali or Parrot. These Operating Systems come packed with useful tools which will aid you in hacking all things. Or you could choose the more bespoke route and opt for Ubuntu or Arch and install all the tools you need manually. Either way, you're going to need to set up a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with one of these distributions installed and running. For a more detailed guide on doing this see 🖥 How to Build a Hacking VPS 🏹. I’ll show you how to set up a Kali… | by Robert Scocca | Medium.
Once this is setup you will need to install OpenSSH on the machine so that you can SSH into the machine from your iPad and run all your favorite hacking tools. In Debian-based systems this can be done with sudo apt install ssh
. Then to start the SSH service run sudo system ssh start
and to check its status run sudo system ssh status
.
Connecting to your VPS
With your hacking VPS up and running, now you need to connect to it from your iPad. This can be done by installing the “Blink Shell & Code Editor” from the app store.
Blink Shell is a professional, desktop grade terminal for iOS. With Mosh & SSH clients for iOS, lightning fast and fully customizable. The best terminal…