This month, Iowa issued their first hepatitis C virus epidemiological profile and the news was not good. The number of cases of hepatitis C reported in Iowa between 2000 and 2015 rose nearly threefold, from 754 cases in 2000 to 2,235 cases in 2015.
Maternal infection with genital herpes, or other pathogens, during early pregnancy could increase risk of autism, or other neurodevelopmental disorders, says a new study.
You know the signs—sneezing, fever, nagging cough, no energy, no appetite. It's the flu, but this time, it's your dog who's down and out. Yes, dogs get the flu, too. However, a team from the University of Rochester Medical Center and their collaborators have developed a new vaccine that may make the doggy flu a thing of the past.
As fun as it is to see Fido's face light up when you feed him table scraps, American dogs are getting fat. The good news is that research is homing in on nutritional strategies to boost canine capabilities to maintain a healthy weight.
Lighthouses and signal fires may have been the first social media. Without the ability to share language, a distant light meant "humans here." A new study from the University of California, San Diego, finds that bacteria can also send out a universal sign to attract the attention of their own, and other bacterial species.
The search for the causative agent of colony collapse—the mass die off of honey bees throughout the US and Europe—has escalated with increasing confusion lately. Everything from pesticides and stress to viruses and mites have been implicated, and some researchers think that many of these environmental factors work together to take down hives.
You might feel the bite, you might not, but an infected mosquito has injected you with a parasite named Plasmodium falciparum, a single-cell protozoa that quickly takes up residence in your body.
One thousand feet under the ground, extremophile microbes that have not seen the light of day for four million years are giving up some fascinating facts to scientists who go the distance.
To much of the United States, Zika seems like a tropical disease that causes horrible problems in other countries but is nothing to be worried about stateside. It may make you rethink your beach vacation abroad, but not much more than that. However, if you live in Florida or Texas, the possibility of getting a Zika infection where you live is real — and local outbreaks are more and more a possibility.
New weapons are needed to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Instead of drugs, scientists have discovered in an animal study that they may be able to harness vampire bacteria to vanquish pneumonia.
Last week it was announced that Waymo, the former Google Self-Driving Car project, had graduated from Alphabet's X innovation center. This graduation had been in the cards for many months with senior members of the project team and X hinting that it would be soon.
In this first part of my series on getting started with Windows Holographic, we are going to cover everything you need to get set up for developing HoloLens apps. There are many pieces coming together to make one single application, but once you get used to them all, you won't even notice. Now there are different approaches you can take to make applications for HoloLens, but this way is simply the fastest.
Augmented, mixed, and virtual reality are all a little bit different, but as many expect—including Metavision—the continuum of our next realities will converge and give us one head-mounted display (HMD) platform that can do it all. If Vrvana, a Canadian company building AR and VR headsets, succeeds, that convergence could begin as early as next year.
Emojis, for better or for worse, have essentially taken over online forms of communication. And now, thanks to a recently discovered feature in iOS, they are going to change the way you search for nearby places.
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department issued criminal indictments against seven Iranian hackers. These hackers, working for private companies in Iran, are accused of orchestrating DDoS attacks against U.S. financial institutions from 2011-2013 as well as intruding into the control panel of a small dam in Rye, New York. It is thought that these attacks were a response to the U.S. tightening financial restrictions on Iran during those years and the NSA-based Stuxnet attack on their uranium enr...
Welcome back, my novice hackers! As many of you know, recon is crucial to a successful hack/pentest. In most cases, hackers spend more time doing good reconnaissance than actually hacking. Without proper recon, you are simply guessing at what type of approach or exploit is going to work and, as a result, your time is wasted without any useful outcomes.
The Oculus Rift is finally shipping to customers in more than 20 countries, and we're getting a good idea of how the device holds up from the initial reviews. You'll see some common threads throughout: along with an impressive virtual reality experience, the device is very comfortable with a solid design.
Although there has been much speculation about how much damage could be done if hackers were to take control of a country's SCADA systems, there have been few examples - until a few months ago, with the power outage in Ukraine caused by hackers.
Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers! A few years back, Microsoft implicitly recognized the superiority of the Linux terminal over the GUI-based operating system by developing PowerShell. Since Windows 7, every Windows operating system has had PowerShell installed by default, and they even made PowerShell capable of running Linux commands on Windows!
Home cooks are often quite intimidated when trying to reproduce the delicious ethnic dishes they enjoy at various restaurants. Thankfully, there are definite flavor profiles and spice/seasoning/herb combos that are very specific to various regional cuisines and cultures; with a little guidance, you can create dishes that are tasty homages to the cuisines you love to eat. In this two-part article (second part here), I'll cover both categories and sub-categories of some of the most popular ethn...
My daughter moved into her first apartment last year, a huge rite of passage in any young person's life. With a mother and two grandmothers who are good cooks (to say the least, in the case of the latter), it's not surprising that she turned to us for some advice about how to improve her own skills in the kitchen. Without question, the single best piece of advice we have given her is to employ mise en place each and every time she prepares a meal.
My first ever post on here was 'Keeping your hacking identity secret' and it did very well, and its not something I see here on null byte. So read along.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! As most of you know, I am strong advocate for using Linux as a hacking platform. In fact, I would say that without knowing Linux, you will never become a professional hacker/pentester.
Alcohol isn't exactly considered a healthy lifestyle choice; more often than not, it's associated with empty calories and bad decisions. But that doesn't mean there aren't a few benefits to drinking in moderation. In fact, gin is a liquor with a wealth of potential benefits to offer. So read on, and discover ten ways in which gin might actually be a good drink for you.
Welcome back, rookie hackers! We recently began an exploration of ways to hack using the Bluetooth protocol. As you know, Bluetooth is a protocol that connects near field devices such as headsets, speakers, and keyboards. Its minimum range is a 10-meter radius (~33 feet) and maximum is at 100 meters (~328 feet).
Baking is one of life's greatest joys. There's something truly magical about taking a half a dozen humble ingredients, mixing them until they're an odd-colored sludge, tossing them into an oven, and watching them emerge as something elegant and delicious.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! One of the issues we often encounter with Metasploit is how to add new modules. Although Rapid7 (Metasploit's owner and developer) periodically updates Metasploit with new exploits, payloads, and other modules, at times, new modules appear that are not added to the Metasploit repository.
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 ...
As many of you know, I firmly believe that hacking is THE skill of the future. Although the term "hacking" often conjures up the image of a pimple-faced script kiddie in their mother's basement transfixed by a computer screen, the modern image of the hacker in 2015 is that of a professional in a modern, well-lit office, hacking and attempting to development exploits for national security purposes. As the world becomes more and more digitally-dependent and controlled, those that can find their...
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! Have you ever wondered where the physical location of an IP address is? Maybe you want to know if that proxy server you are using is actually out of your local legal jurisdiction. Or, maybe you have the IP address of someone you are corresponding with and want to make certain they are where they say they are. Or, maybe you are a forensic investigator tracking down a suspect who wrote a threatening email or hacked someone's company.
Welcome back, my aspiring hackers! Although this article may have been better placed first in this series, I doubt that anyone would have read it when just starting out studying Linux. Now, that you are well into your Linux studies and have some familiarity with how it operates, I'd like to take this moment to explain the philosophy around the Linux operating system.
Charcoal is a famously prized substance when it comes to food and drink. Grilling aficionados swear by it, and its purifying properties make it the main ingredient in Brita filters (and its alternatives).
Among the many gifts that Italy has bestowed upon the world, culinary and otherwise, pesto stands alone. The exact birthplace of pesto, that herby sauce made of pine nuts and olive oil, is an area of Italy called Liguria, whose microclimate is particularly kind to basil, one of pesto's key ingredients.
Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers!
If you took a big step back and really looked at the world, you'd see how downright silly our nations look when they put up fences to separate themselves from one another. Creatures big and small roam free while respecting each other's space, but humans create borders and physical barriers to delineate their cultures.
Welcome back, my hacker novitiates! As you know by now, the Metasploit Framework is one of my favorite hacking tools. It is capable of embedding code into a remote system and controlling it, scanning systems for recon, and fuzzing systems to find buffer overflows. Plus, all of this can be integrated into Rapid7's excellent vulnerability scanner Nexpose.
Welcome back, my novice hackers! In my series on cracking passwords, I began by showing off some basic password-cracking principles; developed an efficient password-cracking strategy; demonstrated how to use Hashcat, one of the most powerful password-cracking programs; and showed how to create a custom wordlist using Crunch. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a custom wordlist based upon the industry or business of the targets using CeWL.
Welcome back, my aspiring hackers! Those of you who use Windows in a LAN environment understand that Windows machines can share directories, files, printers, etc. using "shares." This protocol dates back to the 1980s when the then dominant computer firm, IBM, developed a way for computers to communicate over the LAN by just using computer names rather than MAC or IP addresses.
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.