News: Gut May Hold Key to Infectious Brain Diseases
Specialized cells in the lining of the gut may provide a key to preventing an infectious brain disease caused by misfolded proteins.
Specialized cells in the lining of the gut may provide a key to preventing an infectious brain disease caused by misfolded proteins.
True innovation tends to come from the places we least expect as developers. The Microsoft HoloLens is still a very new product, and some of the other headsets are still just ideas, so the rules for mixed reality are not set in stone. That means all the real problems to be solved are yet to come.
The lingering smell of cigarette smoke can bother just about anyone, including smokers themselves. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to mask or completely get rid of the smell altogether. While you can go through extremes like washing and even repainting the walls in your home, those options don't exist when the odor is in your car.
Welcome to an introduction on writing basic malware, an optional sub-series in which I expose you to malware and its technologies. This is written for those who wish to seek a beginning in malware analysis or enlightenment on the subject. We will be justifying the writing and covering types of malware.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! Recently, Microsoft released a new patch (September 8, 2015) to close another vulnerability in their Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 operating systems. The vulnerability in question (MS15-100) enabled an attacker to gain remote access to any of these systems using a well-crafted Media Center link (MCL) file.
Man-in-the-Middle attacks can prove to be very useful, they allow us to do many things, such as monitoring, injection, and recon.
Hi, dear co-apprentices and wise masters. I've been recently trying to learn the basics to hacking here, and I've read all guides on Wi-Fi hacking and noticed no word is dedicated to this awesome script that comes bundled with Kali!
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! Now that we have begun this trip down web app hacking lane, we need to first address target reconnaissance. Like any hack, reconnaissance is critical. (Are you tired of me saying that yet?)
Welcome back, my nascent hackers! In previous tutorials for my Wi-Fi Hacking series, I have shown you how to crack WEP and WPA2 passwords, break a WPS PIN, and create Evil Twin and Rogue access points. In this continuation of the series, let's look at slightly different approach to attacking wireless.
When I was 12, for some mysterious reason, my dad put my little brothers and me in charge of cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. Naturally, my brothers and I spent the rest of the day playing hide-in-seek in the backyard and forgot all about the humble bird defrosting in the sink.
Welcome back, my novice hackers! Before we try to attack a website, it's worthwhile understanding the structure, directories, and files that the website uses. In this way, we can begin to map an attack strategy that will be most effective.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! As you know, DNS, or Domain Name System, is critical to the operation of the Internet. It provides us with the ability to type in domain names such as www.wonderhowto.com rather than the IP address. This simple service saves us from having to memorize thousands of our favorite website IP addresses. Instead, we simply type in a domain name to retrieve the website.
Welcome back, my budding hackers! When we are looking for ways to hack a system, we need a specific exploit to take advantage of a certain vulnerability in the operating system, service, or application. Although I have shown you multiple ways to exploit systems here in Null Byte, there are still many more exploits available that I have not yet shown you.
Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers! My preference for Linux as a hacking platform is well documented, and I have even created a series of tutorials to train new hackers. Without being proficient in Linux, you can't really call yourself a hacker.
Welcome back, my hackers apprentices! To own a network and retrieve the key data, we only need to find ONE weak link in the network. It makes little sense to beat our heads against heavily fortified systems like the file and database server when we can take advantage of the biggest weak link of all—humans.
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! Several of you have written me asking how to crack passwords. The answer, in part, depends upon whether you have physical access to the computer, what operating system you are running, and how strong the passwords are.
Anyone that has ever watched a member of the opposite sex play a video game knows that the other gender does it wrong.
It's been said time and time again: reconnaissance is perhaps the most critical phase of an attack. It's especially important when preparing an attack against a database since one wrong move can destroy every last bit of data, which usually isn't the desired outcome. Metasploit contains a variety of modules that can be used to enumerate MySQL databases, making it easy to gather valuable information.
Brute-forcing is an easy way of discovering weak login credentials and is often one of the first steps when a hacker finds network services running on a network they gain access to. For beginners and experienced hackers alike, it's useful to have access to the right tools to discover, classify, and then launch customized brute-force attacks against a target. BruteDum does it all from a single framework.
Hashes are commonly used to store sensitive information like credentials to avoid storing them in plaintext. With tools like Hashcat, it's possible to crack these hashes, but only if we know the algorithm used to generate the hash. Using a tool called hash-identifier, we can easily fingerprint any hashes to discover the right Hashcat mode to use to retrieve a password.
UnrealIRCd is an open-source IRC server that has been around since 1999 and is perhaps the most widely used one today. Version 3.2.8.1 was vulnerable to remote code execution due to a backdoor in the software. Today, we will be exploiting the vulnerability with Metasploit, examining the underlying code to understand it, and creating our own version of the exploit in Python.
The USB Rubber Ducky and the Digispark board both suffer from the same issue when attacking macOS computers: a keyboard profiler pop-up which tries to identify any non-Apple USB keyboards. While it's an annoying setback, the solution is a simple modification that allows Mac computers to be targeted, which affects the ability to target Windows and Linux devices.
Reconnaissance is one of the most important and often the most time consuming, part of planning an attack against a target.
SMB (Server Message Block) is a protocol that allows resources on the same network to share files, browse the network, and print over the network. It was initially used on Windows, but Unix systems can use SMB through Samba. Today, we will be using a tool called Enum4linux to extract information from a target, as well as smbclient to connect to an SMB share and transfer files.
One of the most common web application vulnerabilities is LFI, which allows unauthorized access to sensitive files on the server. Such a common weakness is often safeguarded against, and low-hanging fruit can be defended quite easily. But there are always creative ways to get around these defenses, and we'll be looking at two methods to beat the system and successfully pull off LFI.
UAC is something we've all dealt with on Windows, either as a user, administrator, or attacker. It's a core feature of the Windows security model, and for the most part, it does what it's supposed to. But it can be frustrating as a hacker when attempting privilege escalation, but it's easy enough to bypass UAC and obtain System access with Metasploit.
If you find yourself with a roommate hogging limited data bandwidth with video games or discover a neighbor has invited themselves into your Wi-Fi network, you can easily take back control of your internet access. Evil Limiter does this by letting you control the bit rate of any device on the same network as you, allowing you to slow or even stop data transfer speeds for them completely.
Information gathering is one of the most important steps in pentesting or hacking, and it can often be more rewarding to run things on the target itself as opposed to just running scripts against it remotely. With an SQL injection, a hacker can compromise a server and, ultimately, upload and run the "unix-privesc-check" script locally in order to further identify possible attack vectors.
Many online users worry about their accounts being breached by some master hacker, but the more likely scenario is falling victim to a bot written to use leaked passwords in data breaches from companies like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Tumblr. For instance, a tool called H8mail can search through over 1 billion leaked credentials to discover passwords that might still be in use today.
The ability to execute system commands via a vulnerable web application makes command injection a fruitful attack vector for any hacker. But while this type of vulnerability is highly prized, it can often take quite a bit of time to probe through an entire application to find these flaws. Luckily, there is a useful tool called Commix that can automate this process for us.
One of the most critical bugs to come out in the last five years was Shellshock, a vulnerability which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code via the Unix Bash shell remotely. This vulnerability has been around for a while now, but due to the ubiquity of Unix machines connected to the web, Shellshock is still a very real threat, especially for unpatched systems.
It is often said that the best hackers remain unknown, and the greatest attacks are left undiscovered, but it's hard for an up-and-coming penetration tester or white hat to learn anything unless one of those factors is actually known or discovered. But the end goal here in our SQL injection lessons is to make that statement as true as possible for us when performing our hacks.
Some of us woke up at the KRACK of dawn to begin reading about the latest serious vulnerability that impacts the vast majority of users on Wi-Fi. If you weren't one of those early readers, I'm talking about the Key Reinstallation Attack, which affects nearly all Wi-Fi devices.
Nineteen days ago, several hundred people could have been exposed by a traveler with measles in Nova Scotia, Canada. The next day, someone flying from Minnesota to Nebraska may have spread the measles to other passengers. A couple weeks ago, it's possible that a man and his six-month old child spread the measles in several Seattle-based locations. Authorities are trying to locate persons who may have been in contact with these people. None of the persons with measles were vaccinated. Why?
In my last tutorial, I talked about creating a virus inside of a Word Document in the scenario of a mass-mailer attack. In this post, however, I'm going to be covering creating a fake image or screenshot with a meterpreter backdoor hidden inside to be used in a similar scenario. Step 1: Creating the Virus
When performing something such as a mass mailer attack on a company, sending executables usually isn't the best option. That's why, in this tutorial, I'll be teaching you how to code a VBA script macro into a Word document in order to compromise a system. Combined with a little social engineering, this can be a very effective technique.
Recently, I've been experimenting with BeEF (Browser Exploitation Framework), and to say the least, I'm hooked. When using BeEF, you must "hook" the victims browser. This means that you must run the script provided by BeEF, which is titled "hook.js", in the victims browser. Once you've done that, you can run commands against the victims browser and cause all kinds of mayhem. Among these commands, there is an option to use the victims webcam. This is what we'll be doing here today, so, let's g...
Welcome back, my novice hackers! This new series on Bluetooth hacking was inspired by a recent episode of Mr. Robot (my favorite TV show). In episode 6, Eliot hacked the bluetooth keyboard of the police office in order to hack the prison and release his nemesis, Vera. This is just one of the many hacks we will explore in the series.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! In this series, we are exploring the myriad of ways to hack web applications. As you know, web applications are those apps that run the websites of everything from your next door neighbor, to the all-powerful financial institutions that run the world. Each of these applications is vulnerable to attack, but not all in the same way.
Welcome back, my rookie hackers!