The kinds of devices I’m talking about may have another name, I’m just calling them Phone Home Devices because of the old Dreamcast Phone Home project. PHD is a small computer system that an attacker drops off internally on a target network. A cracker walks into an institution, plants his PHD into the Wi-Fi or cabled network, then walks away. The PHD is setup with the tools the cracker needs and is set to “Phone Home” and shovel a shell (using something like Netcat) back to one of the crackers boxes. Since the connection is established from inside of the firewall/NAT box it has a good chance of getting out if the firewall rules are not strict. It’s also useful as a leap stone to attack other networks anonymously. A good PHD will have the following features:

1. Run a good OS that had a TCP/IP stack and ports of tools like Netcat and sniffers.
2. Be cheap, since it is being left at a remote installation and the cracker may never get a chance to retrieve it.
3. Be small enough not to be noticed when hooked to the network.

I know devices like a Zaurus or a home router that runs Linux could be made into good PHDs, any other ideas? It has to be cheap. Anyone know of a way to make your own firmware for an HP printer server to make it do the same kind of thing? Let me hear your thoughts.