And in the bottom corner of her screen, the prompt blinked patiently, waiting for the next command.
The script was called sshrd.sh . Short for “SSH Rapid Deployment.” She’d written it years ago as a joke, a way to push her dotfiles and a rescue toolkit to any server she could SSH into. It was a dumb, beautiful hack: one script that turned any SSH session into a backdoor pipeline. You’d run it on your local machine, it would ssh into a target, scp a payload, and then ssh again to execute it. Crude. Elegant. Dangerous.
./sshrd.sh --target bastion.corp.local --jump dr-vm.internal --payload restore_toolkit.tar.gz sshrd script
[user@firewall-bastion ~]$
Lin’s fingers flew across the keyboard, each keystroke a tiny act of defiance. On her screen, a single line of text glowed in the terminal: And in the bottom corner of her screen,
Then, a new line appeared:
Lin let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. The bastion was still standing. The DR VM was alive. And because sshrd had used only native SSH—no extra agents, no APIs—it had left zero logs the attackers would think to check. It was a dumb, beautiful hack: one script
Here’s a story about the sshrd script.