You take a photo or video, send it to a friend, and they say, "Hey, I can't open this." More often than not, your friend won't be using an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac. Instead, they're likely trying to open the file with a non-Apple device. But this problem can be avoided if you know what setting to change.
It's incredible what technology can do these days, but sometimes, it gets a little scary. For instance, FaceTime's "Eye Contact" feature, which Apple beta-tested in iOS 13 but released with iOS 14, makes it appear like you're looking right at the camera, even when you're actually looking at your friend on the screen. If you find this artificial trick a bit creepy, rest assured you can turn it off at any time.
You don't need to work as an executive at Google to understand and appreciate the importance of large-scale data analytics in today's world. Whether you're interested in joining the ranks of a major tech firm or want to improve your company's marketing campaigns through consumer analysis, knowing how to work with large sets of complex data is paramount.
People use browsers for all types of things, and in general, we trust a lot of personal information to them. That's why browsers are a perfect attack surface for a hacker, because the target may not even know they are infected and feed you all of the information you could want.
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.
While we haven't covered Amazon Web Services, or AWS, on Null Byte before, Amazon's cloud computing platform is ripe for attack by hackers, pentesters, and cybersecurity researchers. It's also an excellent cloud hosting service to build or use vulnerable-by-design AWS setups and frameworks.
Without admin privileges, installing additional software, or modifying the Windows 10 firewall, an attacker can alter a router and perform a variety of exploits. It's accomplished by forwarding requests from Kali through a backdoored Windows computer to the router gateway with simple SSH tunnels.
SSH, or the secure shell, is a way of controlling a computer remotely from a command-line interface. While the information exchanged in the SSH session is encrypted, it's easy to spy on an SSH session if you have access to the computer that's being logged in to. Using a tool called SSHPry, we can spy on and inject commands into the SSH sessions of any other user logged in to on the same machine.
MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman recently asked SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk possibly the best question he's ever been asked: What would he ask a hypothetical AGI system (an AI system with human-level intelligence and understanding) if he only had one question?
Imagine a scenario where you're nowhere near your iPhone, but it's on loud, and you really need to silence it. An alarm may be blaring, notifications could be spitting out sounds left and right, and calls may be ringing. Things can get annoying real quick for whoever's around it. Plus, all that attention makes it easy for someone to find and possibly steal your iPhone. Luckily, you can quiet it down.
Why do you need augmented reality? Because enterprise, they say. And while that's certainly true for several disciplines, there's still that mainstream use case hanging out there waiting for users to discover beyond the realm of enterprise and gaming.
The idea of squeezing your phone might have sounded a bit out there when it was new, but it's now a hallmark feature on Pixel devices. As useful as it is for summoning the Google Assistant, however, it certainly would be nice to be able pick and choose what action is triggered by squeezing the phone. Well, now you can.
Passwords on Windows are stored as hashes, and sometimes they can be tough to crack. In certain situations, though, we can get around that by using the hash as is, with no need to know the plaintext password. It's especially interesting if we can manage to get the hash of an administrative user since we can then authenticate with higher privileges by performing an attack known as pass the hash.
Phone numbers often contain clues to the owner's identity and can bring up a lot of data during an OSINT investigation. Starting with a phone number, we can search through a large number of online databases with only a few clicks to discover information about a phone number. It can include the carrier, the owner's name and address, and even connected online accounts.
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.
Business hours and addresses change, but they're not always updated on Yelp by business owners for the rest of us to see. Showing up when a business is closed or going to the incorrect address is a major annoyance, which is why the company allows us, the customers, to help update business information through the Yelp mobile app on iOS and Android. If owners won't do it, somebody has to.
Your iPhone just went missing, and now you're panicking. You need it for work, to get around, to contact your friends and family, and pretty much everything else in your life. So, what are the chances you might get it back? The odds may be stacked against you unless it's just under a couch cushion, but you can improve your chances of recovering your iPhone by taking certain steps.
In 2018, augmented reality went from the vague promise of interesting things in the near future to tangible developments in software and hardware, proving that immersive computing is indeed the future.
Before you can dive into customizing your OnePlus 6T, you must take the initial step of unlocking the bootloader to gain the ability to install TWRP, Magisk, custom ROMs, and other mods.
If you store important, sensitive information on your iPhone in Notes, you'll want to be more careful. When Notes syncs across your iPad and Mac via iCloud — devices that family members or coworkers may share — you run the risk of having your notes read, edited, and deleted by other people. Such a catastrophe is easily avoided.
Gmail conversations, Facebook private messages, and personal photos can all be viewed by a hacker who has backdoor access to a target's Mac. By livestreaming the desktop or exfiltrating screenshots, this information can be used for blackmail and targeted social engineering attacks to further compromise the mark.
It's always a good idea to know how an attack works at the very basic level. Manual techniques for exploitation often find holes that even the most sophisticated tool cannot. Sometimes, though, using one of these tools can make things so much easier, especially if one has a solid foundation of how it works. One such tool can help us perform a cross-site request forgery with minimal difficulty.
If you're currently running macOS 10.11 or higher on your Mac and connect your iPhone to sync with iTunes, you may get an alert saying that "a software update is required to connect to your iPhone." Here's everything you need to know about what that means, how to update your system, and what to do if updating doesn't work.
It always helps to be prepared for the worst. This applies to our phones now more than ever, as we depend on them to be our record keepers for text messages from friends, family, and coworkers. If you ever lose or severely damage your phone, having a backup of your precious texts gives you the peace of mind of knowing that you can always get them back.
The latest Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story, has grossed almost $350 million worldwide during its first month in theaters. This is a good opportunity to discuss how hackers can use media hype (in this case, Hollywood movie hype) to disarm an unsuspecting Windows user into inserting an evil USB stick into their computer.
The misconception that macOS is more secure than the Windows operating system is far from the truth. With just one small command, a hacker can completely take over a MacBook and control it remotely.
According to Google at their 2018 I/O conference, Google Assistant is now available on over 500 million devices. Now that the assistant is available on iPhones as well, Google has to give iOS users a reason to switch to its assistant over the built-in Siri. Today, Google has eight more reasons for users to do so.
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.
When you don't want somebody you're calling to know the real phone number associated with your iPhone, whether it's for privacy reasons, to avoid being called back, or to prevent being ignored, there are multiple things you can do to block it on their caller ID.
Local port forwarding is good when you want to use SSH to pivot into a non-routable network. But if you want to access services on a network when you can't configure port-forwarding on a router and don't have VPN access to the network, remote port forwarding is the way to go.
Before, the only way to really tell how your iPhone's lithium-ion battery was performing was to use tools such as Geekbench and Battery Life, but now Apple has included some quick battery health checks right into iOS 11.
The mysterious technology product teased via an eccentric TED Talk nearly five years ago has finally been revealed, and it's called the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition. After all of the non-disclosure agreements, furtive comments from CEOs and insiders given early access to the device, and a seemingly never-ending string of hints dropped by the company's CEO, Rony Abovitz, on Twitter, we finally have a real look at the product.
The default tool for payload generation is MSFvenom, a Metasploit standalone payload generator as well as encoder. This tool is an incredibly powerful tool for payload generation, but it can be difficult and requires a bit of reading for newer users.
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.
When you hear people say that Android is more flexible than iOS, it's because of things like Tasker. You can do virtually anything with the venerable automation tool, from saving battery life to controlling your smart home with your fingerprint. But before you get to that, you'll need a good understanding of all the basics.
On the airplane, in the middle of cold and flu season, your seatmate is spewing, despite the clutch of tissues in their lap. Your proximity to an infectious person probably leaves you daydreaming (or is it a nightmare?) of pandemics and estimating how likely it is that this seatmate's viral or bacterial effusions will circulate throughout the plane and infect everyone on board.
Blowing dust and fungal spores are creating a public health problem that could be just a slice of what's to come with climate change.
Regarding foodborne pathogens, eating fish is not as hazardous as it was a few years ago — but if fins are on the menu, it's good to have a heads-up about what's good and what's bad these days.
Our smartphones are full of personally-identifiable information. So much of what we do with these devices is tracked and recorded to make our experience more streamlined and personalized. For many users, that's a fair trade — but for privacy-minded folks, it's a raw deal.
Nothing has stopped you from taking a screenshot of a funny moment in a FaceTime video call before, and nothing probably will. But screenshots are old news. Apple has made it even easier to take capture FaceTime moments on your iPhone, and the results are more lively.
