The Raspberry Pi makes a cameo appearance in Mr. Robot, episode 4!

 

Raspberry Pi as seen on Mr Robot

Mr. Robot is a television series on USA Network.  This is one of the few shows that doesn’t portray animated swirling computer viruses and Tron landscape directory structures, and actually shows the Linux command line!

The “Hacking” Raspberry Pi in Episode 4

In Mr. Robot – eps1.3-da3m0ns.mp4 (episode 4), Elliott proposes a plan to use a Raspberry Pi, to take over the heating system of Evil Corp’s offsite storage facility, Steel Mountain. If they can raise the temperature high enough in the facility, it will render the tape backups unusable.

fsociety believes that if they can destroy those records, millions of people will be free of all their consumer debts held by Evil Corp.

Here is how to create a Raspberry Pi very similar to the one Elliott plans to employ.

1) Download Kali (the ARM Version)

First you need to download the version of Kali compiled for the ARM architecture. Raspberry Pi, and many other mobile devices, use the ARM CPUs because they are energy efficient and run much cooler.

Offensive Security (who are also the funders, founders, and developers of Kali Linux) have precompiled the ARM Version of Kali, using the same build infrastructure as the official Kali releases.

2) Extract the Kali image

You know have a compressed file containing your Kali Linux image. It’s probably looks like this: kali-2.1.2-utilite.img.xz

That means the file has been compressed (or “zipped”) with xz. xz is a lossless data compression program and file format which incorporates the LZMA/LZMA2 compression algorithms. It shares the same compression formats as 7-Zip for Windows.

Tar, in Linux can handle the XV compression:

If you get an error similar to “tar: xz: Cannot exec: No such file or directory”, you’ll need to install xz-utils.

 

3) Write Kali to your Media

Use the dd command to write your Kali image file to your SD card. If the image is named Kali-arm.img and your SD card is /dev/sdd, then we simply need to type:

If this command fails, try reducing the bs to 1M or 512k

3) Boot Kali Linux on your Pi

Remove the SD card from your PC and install the it into your Raspberry Pi. Now boot it up.

When it boots you’ll need the default username and password for Kali to log on.

username: root
password: toor

4) Fine tune the user accounts

First change that default password for root, because everyone knows this password. You are logged in as “root” already so run ‘passwd’ to change that password

Now create a normal user to login with

5) Ensure that you can login remotely

Kali Linux does not come with SSH enabled by default, so you’ll want to add it, then configure it to start at boot time.

Now we need to enable SSH service and make sure it comes back up after a reboot.

Remove the installed run levels for SSH.

Now load the SSH defaults to run level

There you go, now you have a Raspberry Pi running Kali Linux. Make sure you choose a stealthy, innocuous case to house your hacking Raspberry Pi board.

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Filed under: Hardware,Raspberry Pi - @ April 21, 2016 2:33 pm

Tags: mr robot, raspberry pi