Quadriplegic Hacker Needs Help!

[panrubius]

Hi guys,

I've been watching the show since the very beginning, and definitely have deep faith in my technolust! :-) However today, I need some advice from the Hak5 hive mind.

I've been experimenting with Backtrack for quite a while, working through courses and trying to teach myself the art and science of hacking. Up till now all of my experimenting and learning has been done inside of a virtual machine, usually Virtualbox on OS X. But the more I've been reading around the subject, the more it seems like I need to use Kali on its own machine, as the VM is not using all of the computers hardware and therefore not running at its full potential.

But there is a slight snag with me dual booting, booting from a live CD or installing Kali on its own machine. I'm quadriplegic. Which means that I cannot physically put my hands on any piece of hardware, which as you might imagine makes hacking on things that much harder.

I can't operate directly inside a Linux distro because none of them have the assistive technology I need to be able to use interact with the machine, which is why I use OS X because it has software that enables me to use my voice and a switch to control my computer.

So, I imagine that I need a dedicated piece of hardware that can be set up initially by somebody with hands and thereafter I will have TOTAL CONTROL!! (ahem, sorry) I'm aware that this is somewhat of a edge case, but I really don't want to have to stop learning to hack because of my physical limitations rather than my intellectual ability.

Has anybody got any ideas as to how I might go about doing this? I want to minimise my reliance upon other people's hands, and become an independent and totally hands-free hacker!

So, hit me with your great ideas, any and all help would be wonderful and even just pointing me in the right direction of a solution would be just as good.

Thanks in advance!

[combatwombat27]

I have been running Kali inside a vm on my macbook pro with no issues at all. Instead of virtualbox I opted for Parallels just because of the simplicity. I'm not sure that there would be any major differences in using parallels over virtualbox but I can say just devote more hardware to the Kali, set it to use more cores and more ram and you should be just fine. It shouldn't run at such a "poor" level that you wont be able to hack. Having OSX already setup to fit your very specific needs is a real advantage.

[panrubius]

Hi There, thanks for getting back to me.

Yes, I've played with both Parallels and virtualbox but I decided to go with Virtualbox mainly because of the headless mode; so that I can have the wireless card connected up to the Mac Mini in the backroom which is in turn running a copy of Virtualbox. This way I can vnc into the Mac Mini from my laptop and be able to use the virtual machine.

So do you know what it is that seems to make some people think that running Kali on a dedicated box is better than running inside a VM?

Again, thanks for the quick response.