Hello again, readers! In our previous crypter tutorial, we looked at how we could obfuscate our malware (or any program) by using a simple one-byte XOR key. In this quick tutorial, we will be looking at how a simple little tweak can create a better means of obfuscation. Let's get right into it!
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! Web apps are often the best vector to an organization's server/database, an entry point to their entire internal network. By definition, the web app is designed to take an input from the user and send that input back to the server or database. In this way, the attacker can send their malicious input back to the servers and network if the web app is not properly secured.
Welcome back, my aspiring hackers! In this series, we continue to examine digital forensics, both to develop your skills as a forensic investigator and to avoid the pitfalls of being tracked by a forensic investigator.
Welcome back to a tutorial on malware. We'll be discovering a method to beef up our little trooper. Without further ado, let's jump right in!
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.
Managing hard drives in Linux is crucial to understanding your system and its operation as well as understanding the system you are exploiting or conducting a forensic analysis on. Linux has numerous commands that can provide us with information, control, and management of hard drives, and in this tutorial, we will examine a number of the most important ones.
In previous tutorials we have encountered these things called pointers and addresses but we still don't know what they really are. Let's learn a bit more to clear things up.
Welcome back to another tutorial on functions. Last time, we looked inside memory to see what functions looked like in the flesh and all that Assembly was pretty nasty. At least you have some exposure to it. This time, we will be examining how functions work with the stack.
Welcome back, reader! In this tutorial, we will be covering our first program! So let's get to it. We all know the unspoken tradition of the first program when learning a language and of course, here we will respect and complete it. Fire up your favorite text editor (be it vim, emacs, gedit, it's all the same to me, no h8) and try to keep up.
With each day that dawns, there is a new, major hack that makes the news headlines. If you are paying attention, there are usually numerous hacks each day and far more that never make the news or are kept private by the victims. Every so often, a hack is so important that I feel compelled to comment on it here to help us learn something about the nature of hacking and IT security. This is one of those cases. Last week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) revealed that they had been ...
One of the latest home-improvement gadgets out there today, smart lighting, has become more popular as prices come down. That being said, its still quite a penny to shell out. In this article, I'll go through a few of the top products out there today, including the Philips Hue, Belkin WeMo, and Lifx.
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 budding hackers!
Essay writing is the bane of most students' educational existence. Whether you're a college student tired of slaving away over 30-plus page research papers or a high school student just trying to get through AP Language, chances are you'd love to find a way to cut down on all the writing. Before you spend hours googling facts and figures to cram into your next paper, work smarter by cutting down on content.
Tuesday has long been considered the best day to save money on a plane ticket. Airlines typically announce new deals on Monday, so by Tuesday, all other airlines have matched their competitor's lowest fares. It's a tip that I learned at a young age from my father and was solidified by countless others who swore by it. Well, it turns out that we were all wrong.
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 tenderfoot hackers! In continuing my series on digital forensics using Kali, I want to introduce you to two complementary tools, both built right into Kali Linux. These are Brian Carrier's tools Autopsy and Sleuth Kit.
With just a swipe and tap of a finger, we can access enormous libraries of information on our smartphones like never before. Whether we want more info about gluten sensitivity or just want to brush up on 18th century philosophers, there's an article somewhere in the vast ocean of the internet that can lend us a hand.
Welcome back, my novice hackers! I have tried to emphasize throughout this "Hack Like a Pro" series that good reconnaissance is critical to effective hacking. As you have seen in many of these hacks, the techniques that we use are VERY specific to the:
Welcome back, my rookie hackers! The more we know about a system or network, the better our chances of owning it and not leaving a trace for investigators to follow. One of the often overlooked sources for information is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Many rookie hackers are not even aware of it, but it can prove to be a treasure trove of information, if you understand how it works and how to hack it.
Welcome, my neophyte hackers!
Welcome back, my nascent Hackers! In my last blog, we looked at a passive way to gather information necessary for a hack. The advantage of using passive recon is that it's totally undetectable, meaning that the target never knows you're scouting them and you leave no tracks. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's limited to only some websites and not entirely reliable.
Offensive pictures, depressing tweets, political statuses, and just plain old dumb comments are only a few of the reasons why people unfriend or unfollow others on social media sites. Sometimes it's just social spring cleaning, other times there's no reason at all.
We use smartphones for just about everything, and while that may be beneficial to us in our day-to-day lives, it can also be used against us in the court of law.
Unlike TikTok, there isn't a convenient "Likes" tab directly on your Instagram profile page to see all the posts you've ever loved. That's too easy. Instead, you have to dig a bit deeper if you want to take a trip down IG memory lane.
As we move toward the end of the year, the wheels of the augmented reality space continue to shift in major ways.
The progress Tooz has been making in the smartglasses space has been mostly kept under wraps, but the company is slowly giving us a deeper look at what it has in store for smartglasses wearers.
The movie theater business is hurting due to the pandemic, but that hurdle is actually the perfect set of circumstances for movie studios to lean hard into augmented reality marketing.
Written language began with one of the most pedestrian tasks imaginable: accounting. The basis of poetry, epic mythologies, and novels initially involved marking down trades between livestock owners and grain suppliers. We rightfully think that literature is essential to the human spirit. But when contemplating how societies operate, spreadsheets are king.
If there's anything we've learned during 2020, it's that working and learning from home is going to shift the way we do business. With Microsoft announcing that its staff will be allowed to permanently work from home, expect more businesses to follow suit.
The amount of information we see on a daily basis is overwhelming. Then there's all the data we never even see. If your career depends on making sense of all of this information, you need to understand the programs that do the heavy lifting.
Adobe has navigated competition for decades. Since the company's founding in a Silicon Valley garage in 1982, Adobe has led the way in design software. Pivoting to Adobe Creative Cloud in 2011, they've remained ahead of the game with an incredible suite of products.
Since its release in 1991, Python has become one of the world's most popular general-purpose programming languages. From data mining and web programming to cybersecurity and game design, Python can be used for virtually everything online.
Apple's Dark Mode in iOS 13 and later offers a cool, comfortable viewing experience on your iPhone. You may prefer the dark theme all day long, but if you like to use it only at night, it's not very convenient to switch it on and off daily. But there's a setting that lets you set it and forget it, so you never have to do it manually again.
No longer strictly relegated to the realm of science fiction shows and novels, artificial intelligence can be found behind important technologies that are driving innovation throughout the world. From space exploration and self-driving cars to data science and marketing algorithms, AI is the driving force behind many technologies that are moving humanity forward.
More information is available to us now than ever before. We simply cannot make sense of so much data on our own. Thankfully, we have programs to do the heavy lifting for us.
For all the benefits 5G brings to cellular data, it isn't without weaknesses, the biggest being privacy. Yes, the latest standard comes with breakneck downloads speeds up to 4.3 Gbps, but at what cost? Like with all things on the internet, 5G devices open opportunities for both good and bad actors.
File permissions can get tricky on Linux and can be a valuable avenue of attack during privilege escalation if things aren't configured correctly. SUID binaries can often be an easy path to root, but sifting through all of the defaults can be a massive waste of time. Luckily, there's a simple script that can sort things out for us.
No matter how many camera improvements a phone adds, you're always better off using manual mode. Known as "Pro Mode" on the Galaxy S20, this feature can remove Samsung's pre- and post-processing from photos, putting you in total control.
With the Wigle WiFi app running on an Android phone, a hacker can discover and map any nearby network, including those created by printers and other insecure devices. The default tools to analyze the resulting data can fall short of what a hacker needs, but by importing wardriving data into Jupyter Notebook, we can map all Wi-Fi devices we encounter and slice through the data with ease.
