Arsenic occurs naturally in the environment, but it is also one of the most commonly found heavy metals in wastewater, deposited there by inappropriate disposal and arsenical pesticides, for example.
Even as health authorities describe the symptoms of Zika infection in the general population as mild, a new surveillance study finds serious side effects are more common, and serious, than previously thought.
Marijuana is legal to use for medical purposes in 28 states and the District of Columbia, but the quick development of this new industry could have left some regulation issues in the lurch.
A virtual design and construction services firm has built an augmented reality application that uses the Microsoft HoloLens to improve the efficiency of quality control on construction sites.
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.
Japan is in the process of curbing its aging population and mature workforce. According to The Diplomat, the country's population has been declining at a steady rate. To meet future productivity demands in commercial and industrial sectors, local officials are turning to self-driving technology, including truck platooning, where three or five vehicles travel autonomously in a string formation. This practice, according to a study by MIT, can reduce fuel consumption by up to 20% (more about thi...
Have the sniffles? Yes. Does your head hurt? Yes. Coughing? Yes. Could you have influenza? Yes. How do you know the difference? With these symptoms, you could also have a cold.
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.
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.
Bacteriotherapy sounds a lot more amenable of a term than "fecal transplant," yet they're both treatments that use bacteria itself to cure or treat infections. Fecal transplants, specifically, are an up-and-coming treatment option for a potentially deadly and difficult-to-treat diarrheal infection called Clostridium difficile.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
Although your friends might roll their eyes every time you talk about playing Clash of Clans, Call of Duty, or Candy Crush Saga, your excessive gaming habits might actually be making you healthier than everyone else.
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.
Airports are terrible germ-infested purgatories where people sit around for hours without Wi-Fi while they anxiously await to get wherever they really want to go. Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about waiting, but this little Wi-Fi hack could help make the waiting a little less boring.
Last night, I was reading a riveting National Geographic article on the green-eyed tree frog, until I was quickly interrupted by an annoying popup asking me to "create a free account" or "sign in." Really, I'd like to do neither. I just want to read about tree frogs.