Correctly identifying the underlying technologies that run on a website gives pentesters a considerable advantage when preparing an attack. Whether you're testing out the defenses of a large corporation or playing the latest CTF, figuring out what technologies a site uses is a crucial pen-tester skill.
This time last year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his company were faced with an erosion of its user base that cratered its stock price. This year, on the strength of Snapchat's AR camera effects, the company has reversed course. And that's why Spiegel tops the NR30, our annual list of the leaders in the AR industry.
Starting Sept. 13, you can preorder the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, or 11 Pro Max from Apple, wireless carriers, and various e-commerce websites. However, unlike with Android smartphones, there is only one set of iOS phones that come out each year, so they're pretty hot items. That means being the first to get your hands on one could be a challenge, but we're here to help you out.
The streaming content vision from Magic Leap recently underwent a quiet but major update, courtesy of AT&T.
Smartphone hardware surpassed the most popular portable game devices long ago in all but one category — control. Your iPhone is more than capable of running impressive, fully-realized games, but touch controls only go so far. That's why it's so exciting that Apple has added support for PS4 and Xbox controllers with iOS 13.
Now that we've had our hands on the Magic Leap One for almost a year and early adopter developers have had the opportunity to publish apps for the AR headset, it's time to see how it stands up against the rigors of a day at the office. We did just that, and we wrote about it!
One of the best ways to dig into a website and look for vulnerabilities is by using a proxy. By routing traffic through a proxy like Burp Suite, you can discover hidden flaws quickly, but sometimes it's a pain to turn it on and off manually. Luckily, there is a browser add-on called FoxyProxy that automates this process with a single click of a button.
It is said that the best way to avoid detection when hacking is to leave no trace, and often that means not touching the filesystem at all. But realistically, in most cases, it's impossible not to interact with the filesystem in one way or another. The next best thing to do to throw off any investigators is to change the file attributes to hide activity. We can do this with Metasploit's Timestomp.
While modern browsers are robust and provide a lot of functionality, they can be unlocked to do some pretty spectacular things with browser extensions. For hackers and OSINT researchers, these tools can be used to defeat online tracking, log in to SSH devices, and search the internet for clues during an investigation. These are a list of my top ten favorite browser extensions for hackers — and how to use them.
On Instagram, it's all about the sharing, but not all sharing is equal. Take stories, for example. Up until recently, stories couldn't be easily shared outside the Instagram bubble. Now, Instagram lets you share a convenient link to a part of your story or your entire story on any other platform — text, email, social app — pretty much anywhere.
While Magic Leap turned heads at the Game Developers Conference with AR experiences at the Unity and Unreal Engine booths, news broke that the company was the winning bidder for ODG's patents.
In the past, if you stumbled upon a Yelp listing you liked, you could bookmark it and check it out later on your profile. You can still take advantage of this feature in the mobile apps, but it's more refined now than it ever was thanks to Collections, a feature Yelp first added back in May 2018. You get more power over organizing, accessing, sharing, and discovering favorite businesses.
Websites are often misconfigured in ways that allow an attacker to view directories that are not ordinarily meant to be seen. These directories can contain sensitive information such as private credentials or configuration files that can be used to devise an attack against the server. With a tool called Websploit, hackers can scan targets for these hidden directories without difficulty.
NetBIOS is a service that allows for communication over a network and is often used to join a domain and legacy applications. It is an older technology but still used in some environments today. Since it is an unsecured protocol, it can often be a good starting point when attacking a network. Scanning for NetBIOS shares with NBTScan and the Nmap Scripting Engine is a good way to begin.
Living in this age of smartphones and always being connected can sometimes have us getting carried away with our devices. Whether it's an addiction to our phone or if we just feel like cutting back on some daily screen time, there's a great tool that can help with that — Google's official Digital Wellbeing app puts you in control by laying out all the stats you need to help curb your daily smartphone habits.
Having an efficient workflow is an integral part of any craft, but it's especially important when it comes to probing apps for vulnerabilities. While Metasploit is considered the de facto standard when it comes to exploitation, it also contains modules for other activities, such as scanning. Case in point, WMAP, a web application scanner available for use from within the Metasploit framework.
Nmap is more powerful than you know. With a few scripts, we can extend its functionality beyond a simple port scanner and start to identify details about target servers sysadmins don't want us to know.
A simple security flaw can allow an attacker to gain a strong foothold with little effort on their part. When a web application permits remotely hosted files to be loaded without any validation, a whole can of worms is opened up, with consequences ranging from simple website defacement to full-on code execution. For this reason, RFI can be a promising path to obtaining a shell.
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.
A team of academics from three different universities and two private companies have just discovered a new vulnerability that affects almost every Android device since 2012. The vulnerability is known as RAMpage, and it could be used to gain complete control over the device.
Electronic warfare tactics work by jamming, disrupting, or disabling the technology a target uses to perform a critical function, and IoT devices are especially vulnerable to attacks. Wireless security cameras like the Nest Cam are frequently used to secure critical locations, but a hacker can surgically disable a webcam or other Wi-Fi connected device without disturbing the rest of the network.
When it comes to the sub-$250 price range, the new Nokia 5.1 might be the perfect phone. Of all the new models announced at Nokia's event in Moscow, the Nokia 5.1 offers the most with the least compromises. For a third of the cost of a flagship, you get a phone with a premium build, solid specs, and good battery life.
It's possible to stream a MacBook's entire computer screen without using Apple's Screen Sharing application and without opening any ports on the target device. A hacker with low user privileges on the backdoored Mac may be able to view a victim's every move in real time no matter where they are.
Whichever web browser you use, each comes with a way to surf the net "secretly." While nothing on the internet is truly anonymous, private browsing modes can help keep your movements hidden from those who might have access to your data. The "secret mode" for the Samsung Internet app goes a step further on Android, by locking your private browsing behind a unique password.
Google Lens is a fantastic addition to Google Photos for Android and iOS that allows your smartphone to identify a number of things in your pictures, like landmarks and contact info. Using this power, you can even find out how to buy almost any product you've taken a photo of — you don't even need the barcode.
Hashes containing login passwords are transmitted between Windows computers on local Wi-Fi networks. By intercepting and decrypting these hashes using Responder and John the Ripper, respectively, we can learn a target's login credentials which can be later used to gain physical access to their computer.
It doesn't matter how cool or groundbreaking a particular technology is, if it doesn't offer the promise of big returns on investments, you'll have trouble drawing interest from both Silicon Valley and Wall Street. That's why we're increasingly seeing existing augmented reality players doing everything they can to focus in on revenue generation, which was the message coming from Snap Inc. this week.
Apple first announced Business Chat, a new way for customers to communicate with companies, at WWDC 2017. While Business Chat did not arrive with the initial release of iOS 11, Apple pushed it out in iOS 11.3 so companies can offer customer service in a whole new way, and it works pretty much the same in iOS 12 and higher as it did back then.
With an ordinary birthday card, we can introduce a physical device which contains malicious files into someone's home and deceive them into inserting the device into a computer.
Even though most phones don't have Oreo yet, Google has released Android 9.0 Pie. It's available on Google's own Pixel devices, and updates should soon be available to partnered devices from Essential, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi. We're already digging into it to highlight all of the features and changes.
In 2017, major breakthroughs in smartphone-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) opened up new doorways for developers and users of both Apple and Android phones. Unfortunately for Android users, the solution that Google is previewing, ARCore, currently only works on three Android smartphones. But Silicon Valley start-up uSens is stepping in to fix that with its new engine called uSensAR.
IFTTT is a fantastic tool that lets you trigger actions on your smartphone that normally require more advanced hacking. With the help of its friendly user interface, turning your phone into a more personal device has never been easier. However, the app has some more intricate options under the surface, making advanced implementations of applets difficult for beginners.
Over the past month, we've spent significant time covering Samsung's Oreo Beta program, and the detailed list of features in Oreo is extensive for the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Many of you were upset when the Galaxy Note 8 was left out of the official Oreo beta program entirely, but we found a method to install a beta Oreo build right now on the unlocked and US variants if you'd like to give it a try.
When it comes to security, Apple is usually at the top of the pack when it comes to your personal data, minus a few embarrassing flaws here and there. However, a new iOS security concern has been discovered that protects your data less than it did before — and Apple designed it like that.
We covered how to upload your library to Google Play Music, but now it's time to delve deeper into the platform. In this article, we'll discuss how to discover new music through a myriad of methods, by using your existing library as a foundation.
Since the release of the T-Mobile G1, the Play Store has been flooded with apps that claim to improve performance by clearing cache and storage. These apps are typically useless, rarely providing more than a temporary fix which Android undoes immediately. As Android has continued to improve cache and storage management, such apps have become more trivial. However, there are few decent ones out there.
In a previous article, we learned how to take advantage of a feature, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to run malicious code when a Microsoft Word document is opened. The biggest challenge of this attack is that it requires getting the user to agree to a pop-up prompt. Fortunately, since I posted that article, many new obfuscation techniques have been discovered to make this easier. Today, we explore and combine some of them to make the ultimate hidden DDE attack.
In October of 2017, Mathy Vanhoef released "Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2." This paper demonstrates a way to decrypt traffic on practically any WPA2 network, the most commonly used form of wireless security (seeing as all other forms of Wi-Fi encryption have already been broken). Practically all of the network-connected devices we use will need to be updated in some way in order to protect against this vulnerability, each of them in a different way.
If you need to scan a large number of domains for a specific web app vulnerability, Dorkbot may be the tool for you. Dorkbot uses search engines to locate dorks and then scan potentially vulnerable apps with a scanner module.
Due to the overnight success of smartphones, millions of people are connecting with others. Currently, over 15 million text messages are sent every minute worldwide. Most of this communication is happening in the open where any hacker can intercept and share in the discussion unbeknownst to the participants. However, we don't need to communicate insecurely.