How-To Guides from Null Byte: Page 24

There are a lot of programs which allow opening archives. Alas, most of them are rather complicated to use. The process of opening of the archive often takes much time. Hopefully, there are some applications which are simpler to use for regular uers.

AppleScript is quite an easy scripting language to use. In this guide, I will be showing you several commands. Near the end, I will show how these can be used to create a fake virus that actually does no harm.

Hey, hackers! Now that you've hacked/owned your first "box" in my last article, let's look a little closer at another great feature of Metasploit, the Meterpreter, and then let's move on to hacking a Linux system and using the Meterpreter to control and own it.

You walk over to your laptop, wiggle your mouse to wake up the screen, then fire up your browser to come visit Null Byte. Catching the article about Anonymous and how they presumably will not take down the Internet, you find yourself wondering... how would someone take down the Internet? Could they even do it?

You're sitting in front of your grandmother's Windows XP machine that has the worst infection you've ever seen. Safe mode? No dice. Restore points? They're compromised. Even worse, all of the files are hidden and none of the executables will run! This leaves her computer in a bricked state. Without some serious CPR, it will be lost to you. Sure, you could just reinstall the system, but then you might lose all of that valuable data.

Big brother is watching when you're playing around on another system—and big brother is that system. Everything from operating systems to intrusion detection systems to database services are maintaining logs. Sometimes, these are error logs that can show attackers trying various SQL injection vectors over and over. This is especially so if they are using an automated framework like sqlmap that can spam a ton of requests in a short time. More often than not, the access logs are what most...

If Null Byte had a large Batman-like spotlight calling for help, we would definitely be using it right now. However, we don't, so this is my digital equivalent. Information security is a huge field, far too much for one man to cover adequately, so I need your help!

Injection is an attack vector that involves breaking out of a data context and switching into a programming context through the use of special characters. These characters are significant to the interpreter being used, but not needed for the general user input being asked for.

No doubt you've seen some of the hack logs being released. One part that stands out over and over again is the heavy database usage. It used to be early on that virus and hackers would destroy data, usually just for lulz. However, with the explosive commercial growth of the Internet, the real target is turning into data theft. You should learn how this happens so you can protect yourself accordingly. Let's take a look at what makes this possible and dare I say, easy.

Wouldn't it be nice to just sit at your buddy's house, plug into his network, and see exactly what he's doing? What if it was as easy as that? What makes packet sniffers like Wireshark such potent tools is that a majority of local area networks (LANs) are based on the shared Ethernet notion.

If you follow the Anonymous, Occupy, and IT security scenes, you have no doubt heard about a dox release. What is it? How can it hurt you? And most importantly, how can you protect yourself from it? Some of these steps might seem common sense, while others will be an ah-ha! moment. Your private info is both your biggest weakness and your biggest weapon in your battle to remain anonymous. You must learn how to use it as both.

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a series of high-profile hacks and leaks. From the rooting of CombinedSystems, to a secret FBI conference call leak, all the way to the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on U.S. government sites—with a lot in-between. As governments move to close their long fingers around the free speech that exposes their secrets, this shadowy collective of loose-knit, but like-minded individuals are hell bent on preventing them. Or are they?

With the mass arrests of 25 anons in Europe and South America, and the rumors of an FBI sweep on the east coast of America floating around, times look dicey for hackers. Over the past few days, a lot of questions have been posed to me about removing sensitive data from hard drives. Ideas seem to range from magnets to microwaves and a lot of things in-between. So, I'd like to explain a little bit about data forensics, how it works, and the steps you can take to be safe.

Last week, we had a great contribution from Christopher Voute, who introduced us all on some of the basic moves in Python. Now, who else will share their knowledge and tackle some of the topics below?

Are you the expert hacker we're looking for? Do you have a great idea for an article on Null Byte? Do you have a passion to write, and more importantly... teach?

Imagine you're in Paris and you need to get to Versailles. Looking around for directions, you come to a cold realization—you do not speak a lick of French! How are you going to get to Versailles and what happens if there is a detour? It will be a difficult struggle, and you'd probably get lost and eventually fail. This is why it's important to know some of the country's language before taking that trip in the first place.

Social engineering is described as the clever manipulation of the natural tendency of human trust. All of the passwords, locks, and encryption in the entire world are useless against a good social engineer who can charm or trick you into giving it up.

Brainwashing is something that happens to us every day, whether you believe it or not. It doesn't take fancy tools or space-age technology. Even if our country didn't intentionally brainwash people (believe me, they do), our country's media is brainwashing people nonstop. Just sit back and think about it for a second—about the way things work in the world and media. But before you do that, let's learn what brainwashing really is.

We had a blast during last week's social engineering calls. One of our attending social engineers was so clever that she convinced several people on Craigslist that lost items were hers, even if it seemed she couldn't be trusted. But females are better social engineers, naturally. Some say that females have a special knack for manipulating men, but I think that's preposterous. I can't see why that would be true in a million years (note my sarcasm).

SSH is amazing, and we praise its existence on Null Byte for many reasons. Notably, it allows us to reroute our traffic through encrypted ports on our local host to be sent to its destination when on the go. You can even control your home computers remotely over a secure and encrypted connection. This is handy for a multitude of reasons.

Sometimes, paying for the whole Xbox LIVE service might seem like a waste of money. You're constantly experiencing lag, you've got people modding and cheating, kids are being loud and obnoxious over the mic, and your kill-to-death ratio is getting dumped on. Basically, the whole multiplayer experience just isn't cutting it anymore—you want to go back to the classic world of single player. Well, there's always downloadable content—simply known as DLC.

We're officially seeking Null Byters on a weekly basis who are willing to take the time to educate the community. Contributors will write tutorials, which will be featured on the Null Byte blog, as well as the front page of WonderHowTo (IF up to par, of course). There is no need to be intimidated if you fear you lack the writing skills. I will edit your drafts if necessary and get them looking top-notch! You can write tutorials on any skill level, and about anything you feel like sharing that...

It's no secret that water and electronics don't mix well, but somehow, people always manage to combine the two. I've had my fair share of water-damaged electronics, everything from cheap headphones to a desktop computer. My devices are getting dunked in water so much, it's like doughnuts in coffee. And I know I'm not the only one. That jam session with your favorite song will end really quick when your iTouch is chilling in the toilet bowl.

Do you need proxy access, but cannot have it for some reason? The most common perpetrator behind the issue is the network you're trying to access the pages from. Some networks will block websites, then go as far as filtering out all of the web queries for terms like "proxy" because it can get around their filter. Quick web proxies can be used for tons of other things, though.

Lost the product key for your game? If you have to reinstall the game and don't have that key anymore, you're out of luck, especially if you didn't "buy" the game. But never be in fear of losing product keys again with today's Null Byte, where we'll be practicing a little bit of mind-kung fu.

Lock picking is defined by locksmiths as "the art of opening a lock without the key". There's many ways to accomplish this, but I'm specifically interested in using a lock pick set. Since locks vary in shapes and size, it's better to stick with just one kind of lock at first. Most locks are based on fairly similar concepts, so sharing methods across locks is possible.

We're officially seeking Null Byters on a weekly basis who are willing to take the time to educate the community. Contributors will write tutorials, which will be featured on the Null Byte blog, as well as the front page of WonderHowTo (IF up to par, of course). There is no need to be intimidated if you fear you lack the writing skills. I will edit your drafts if necessary and get them looking top-notch! You can write tutorials on any skill level, and about anything you feel like sharing that...

This is the first official announcement for a new weekly activity on Null Byte for the community to participate in. Starting next week, depending on how much traffic we get doing it, we are going to start doing live social engineering calls via Skype. I've made a list below so that you can get a feel for some of things we'll try to accomplish in these calls.

In this article I'll show you how to make a simple IP address notifier. The program will text you your new IP address, in the event that it changes. For those of you with dynamic IPs, this is very useful. I'm constantly frustrated when my IP changes, and it's handy to be notified via text when it happens. To use the program, you'll need Python 2.7 or later, urllib2, and a program called "text" (see this article here to get it).

Many windows users, if not all, run into a virus infection once in a while. This is unavoidable when using Microsoft's operating system. Without digressing too much, the fact that Windows is such a popular OS with no controlled software sources makes it easy for viruses and malware to spread. And while there's a plethora of antivirus tools for Windows, sometimes infections (such as certain scareware) can disable the install and/or use of antivirus systems and render your OS unusable until...

I have to say, the Xbox 360 controller is the best controller ever created. When I first held it back in 2005, I swore that the dudes working at Microsoft came over and took a molding of my hands because of how great it felt. The thing felt like it was born there.

Google is great. They provide us with tons of free services and open source APIs that we can code fun tools for, one of which I don't think gets enough credit: Google Voice.

In this article, I'll show you how to send SMS messages with Python. You'll need Python 2.7 or later, urllib and urllib2. The code basically uses an online text messaging service to "POST" html data, as if a person was entering the data themselves. The uses for something like this are unlimited. For example, I modified the basic code so I would receive a text message letting me know every time someone rang my doorbell. The program could interface with Arduino through a serial port, and send...

In this article, I'll show you how to create a simplistic AES python based text encryptor. You'll need python 2.7 and PyCrypto (found here). The code is fairly simple, a user enters an encryption key (which basically tells the program how to scramble the text, using an algorithm), then the text to be encrypted. The program takes the key and text and inputs it into the "cryptograph" or code-based algorithm from PyCrypto. PyCrypto can use 16, 24, or 36 character encryption keys, but for the sake...

In this article, I'll show you how to make a simple Gmail notifier. Python can do various things in terms of notifications; sending commands to an Arduino unit, playing sounds, opening windows, etc. The code below simply plays some music, but the possibilities of notification methods are endless. If you aren't familiar with python, there are many sites with tutorials like this one, or this one.

There was a huge ban wave recently on Xbox Live. In the unfortunate event that you decided to do something against Microsoft policy, and have consequently gotten yourself banned from Xbox Live, you may have come to the realization that doing whatever got you banned from Xbox Live in the first place was not worth the risk.

If you've read Alex Long's last two articles in this series (Part 1 and Part 2), you know by now that making money rarely is risk free, and generally plays out to be a high risk-high gain/loss scenario. The best way to make money is to have money, so for this article, lets assume a financial backing of about $10,000 dollars. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be working with online trading systems in this article. Some stocks are traded on exchanges, where buyers meet sellers and decide...

It has been suggested that about 150 million internet users will be affected by today's blackout of Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know what those are, go here and read up on it, and then take action yourself! After you've contacted your Representatives about these bills, you'll probably still need to get some work done today using Wikipedia's English-language site.

It's not uncommon to find a good mod these days, for any given game. But as I have mentioned before, Skyrim is not just a game. It's a drug... A horribly entertaining drug..

Hello! Today's blog post will be about coding a very rudimentary Client and Server application duo, which will communicate by using TCP Sockets.