Mac for Hackers

Now that we've talked about encryption and managing your passwords, let's continue this series on getting your Mac ready for hacking by turning our attention to the terminal.

MacOS isn't known as an ideal operating system for hacking without customization, but it includes native tools that allow easy control of the Wi-Fi radio for packet sniffing. Changing channels, scanning for access points, and even capturing packets all can be done from the command line. We'll use aliasing to set some simple commands for easy native packet capture on a macOS system.

With all of the bare-bones setup out of the way in our Mac for Hackers series, your Apple machine should be ready to run a significant amount of pentesting tools. We can pull tools from GitHub and compile them, we can pull dependencies or tools from Homebrew, we have both Python and Ruby. Everything is ready to go and now it's time to start building a toolbox on our local host.

Metasploit is an extremely popular pentesting tool capable of enumeration, exploitation, and injecting shell code, and is a part of almost every hacking toolkit. So there's no way I could leave this out of our series on getting your Mac set up for hacking.

We're almost there to completing the setup of your Mac for hacking! Now that we have Git and Homebrew under our belts, it's time to take on something fairly easy, but very important for our hacking needs.

Now that we've learned about keeping all our data safe with encryption, it's time to continue progressing through getting your Mac set up for hacking.