How-To Guides from Null Byte: Page 9

While there are a variety of privacy-focused search engines available like StartPage and DuckDuckGo, nothing can offer the complete trust offered by creating one's own search engine. For complete trust and security, Searx can be used as free metasearch engine which can be hosted locally and index results from over 70 different search engines.

The microphone in a Windows computer is accessible to most applications running on the device at all times and completely without security limitations. Information gathered from recorded audio conversations taking place in the surrounding area of a compromised computer can be used for social engineering, blackmail, or any number of other reasons.

While the security behind WEP networks was broken in 2005, modern tools have made cracking them incredibly simple. In densely populated areas, WEP networks can be found in surprising and important places to this day, and they can be cracked in a matter of minutes. We'll show you how a hacker would do so and explain why they should be careful to avoid hacking into a honeypot.

Beginners learning brute-forcing attacks against WPA handshakes are often let down by the limitations of default wordlists like RockYou based on stolen passwords. The science of brute-forcing goes beyond using these default lists, allowing us to be more efficient by making customized wordlists. Using the Mentalist, we can generate millions of likely passwords based on details about the target.

Deleted bank statements and private photos are still within an attacker's grasp, so don't think that emptying your recycling bin is enough to keep your files from coming back to life. It's possible for a hacker to recover compromising files and images from a backdoored computer completely without the victim's knowledge.

Screenshots taken from a compromised computer can provide hackers with access to private emails, photographs, and information found in sensitive documents. This data can be used by the attackers to build profiles of a target for social engineering attacks and blackmail or even just to release the information out in the wild.

Welcome back, my rookie hackers!

Design flaws in many routers can allow hackers to steal Wi-Fi credentials, even if WPA or WPA2 encryption is used with a strong password. While this tactic used to take up to 8 hours, the newer WPS Pixie-Dust attack can crack networks in seconds. To do this, a modern wireless attack framework called Airgeddon is used to find vulnerable networks, and then Bully is used to crack them.

Proxies can be quicker to use than a VPN for specific applications, like web browsers or torrent clients. Both services will hide your true IP address, but a VPN is slowed down because it encrypts all data through a VPN network, while a proxy just acts as a middleman for fetching and returning requests from a server on your behalf. When speed is needed, go proxy.

After finding and monitoring nearby wireless access points and devices connected to them, hackers can use this information to bypass some types of security, like the kind used for Wi-Fi hotspots in coffee shops, hotels, and in flights high above the ground. By swapping their MAC address for that of someone already connected, a hacker can bypass the MAC filter and connect freely.

During our last adventure into the realm of format string exploitation, we learned how we can manipulate format specifiers to rewrite a program's memory with an arbitrary value. While that's all well and good, arbitrary values are boring. We want to gain full control over the values we write, and today we are going to learn how to do just that.

In the previous article, we learned how to set up our VPS, configure our PHP server, and developed an in-depth understanding of how the payload works. With all that taken care of, we can get into disguising our payload to appear as an image and crafting the note in the greeting card being delivered to our intended target.

In the previous article in this short series, we learned how to find our neighbor's name using publicly accessible information and how to monitor device activity on their home network. With this information at our disposal, it's time to get into installing and configuring the necessary tools to begin our attack on John Smith's computer.

Security-minded users can reduce the risk of phishing by enabling Advanced Protection on important Google accounts, requiring a U2F security token to log in. Using these keys isn't intuitive on most popular smartphone platforms, and you can find yourself locked out if you don't plan ahead. You'll need to learn and practice using U2F keys on your device before enabling this layer of security.

Now that we have our payload hosted on our VPS, as well as Metasploit installed, we can begin developing the webpage which will trick our "John Smith" target into opening our malicious file. Once he has, we can take over his computer.

Dating websites allow you to see a person in a very intimate context, framing their successes and accomplishments in life to an important audience. The information contained in these profiles often can't be found elsewhere, offering a unique look into the personal life of the user.

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.

Whether you're white hat, black hat, or some shade in-between, navigating through a network is a core part of hacking. To do that, we need to be able to explore a network to discover the addresses of gateways, interfaces, and other attached devices. When ifconfig just isn't enough, you can steer your way around a network with a convenient tool called Ship, the script for everything IP.

Coinhive, a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner, was reportedly discovered on the BlackBerry Mobile website. It was placed there by hackers who exploited a vulnerability in the site's e-commerce software that allowed them to anonymously mine cryptocurrency every time the website was viewed. There's no doubt Coinhive, an innovative mining method, is being abused and exploited by hackers in the wild.

Format strings are a handy way for programmers to whip up a string from several variables. They are designed to save the programmer time and allow their code to look much cleaner. Unbeknownst to some programmers, format strings can also be used by an attacker to compromise their entire program. In this guide, we are going to look at just how we can use a format string to exploit a running program.

Koadic allows hackers to monitor and control exploited Windows systems remotely. The tool facilitates remote access to Windows devices via the Windows Script Host, working with practically every version of Windows. Koadic is capable of sitting entirely in memory to evade detection and is able to cryptographically secure its own web command-and-control communications.

When using Linux, we often need to install new software, a script, or numerous large files. To make things easier on us, these files are usually compressed and combined together into a single file with a .tar extension, which makes them easier to download, since it's one smaller file.

The internet is constantly under siege by bots searching for vulnerabilities to attack and exploit. While conventional wisdom is to prevent these attacks, there are ways to deliberately lure hackers into a trap in order to spy on them, study their behavior, and capture samples of malware. In this tutorial, we'll be creating a Cowrie honeypot, an alluring target to attract and trap hackers.

Millions of travelers pass through airports each day without understanding how powerful and insecure a boarding pass can be. Anyone can scan the boarding pass barcode with a mobile app, allowing access to frequent-flyer accounts and even a passenger's temporary airline account. In this guide, we will explore how hackers scan and decode the information contained in a boarding pass barcode and why.

The one thing that separates a script kiddy from a legitimate hacker or security professional is the ability to program. Script kiddies use other people's tools, while hackers and security pros write their own tools. To that end, we're going to see how a stack overflow vulnerability allows us to flood a variable with enough input to overwrite the instruction pointer with our own commands.

With the addition of the OpenSSH client and server in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you no longer have to rely on third-party programs to open an SSH server and connect to a Windows machine. While still a beta feature, this represents a long-overdue update fulfilling a promise made back in 2015.

JavaScript is one of the most common languages used on the web. It can automate and animate website components, manage website content, and carry out many other useful functions from within a webpage. The scripting language also has many functions which can be used for malicious purposes, including stealing a user's cookies containing passwords and other information.

Very often we have processes in Linux that we want to always run in the background at startup. These would be processes that we need to start at bootup and always be available to us.

With Virtual Network Computing, you don't need to carry a spare keyboard, mouse, or monitor to use your headless computer's full graphical user interface (GUI). Instead, you can connect remotely to it through any available computer or smartphone.

Configuring onion services for the first time can be tricky. A surprising number of system administrators make seemingly trivial mistakes that ultimately lead to catastrophic cases of de-anonymizing supposedly anonymous sites on the dark web. OnionScan is a tool designed to identify common misconfigurations in onion services and aid us in understanding how to fix them.

File inclusion can allow an attacker to view files on a remote host they shouldn't be able to see, and it can even allow the attacker to run code on a target.

PowerShell Empire is an amazing framework that is widely used by penetration testers for exploiting Microsoft Windows hosts. In our previous guide, we discussed why and when it's important to use, as well as some general info on listeners, stagers, agents, and modules. Now, we will actually explore setting up listeners and generating a stager.

Master Lock combination padlocks have been known to be vulnerable to an attack that reduces their 64,000 possible combinations down to 100. I've devised a new attack for cracking any Master combo lock that simplifies the process and reduces the amount of work down to only 8 combinations.

The public leaks of NSA tools and information have led to the release of previously secret zero-day exploits such as EternalBlue, which was used in the notorious WannaCry ransomware attack. Despite multiple patches being released, many users have failed to update their systems, so many devices are still vulnerable to these now-public attacks.

A weak password is one that is short, common, or easy to guess. Equally bad are secure but reused passwords that have been lost by negligent third-party companies like Equifax and Yahoo. Today, we will use Airgeddon, a wireless auditing framework, to show how anyone can crack bad passwords for WPA and WPA2 wireless networks in minutes or seconds with only a computer and network adapter.

An attacker with shell access to a Linux server can manipulate, or perhaps even ruin, anything they have access to. While many more subtle attacks could provide significant value to a hacker, most attacks also leave traces. These traces, of course, can also be manipulated and avoided through methods such as shell scripting.

Recently I was trying to install Kali Live on a USB drive with persistence and struggled to find a tutorial online that was simple and actually worked. After some trial and error I figured out how to do it correctly and decided to make an article for anyone who is experiencing the same difficulty I did. You will need an USB with at least 8GB. Mine is 132GB, nice and large.

Welcome back, my novice hackers!

There are more than 2 billion Android devices active each month, any of which can be hacked with the use of a remote administration tool, more commonly known as a RAT. AhMyth, one of these powerful tools, can help outsiders monitor a device's location, see SMS messages, take camera snapshots, and even record with the microphone without the user knowing.

Code execution in Microsoft Word is easier than ever, thanks to recent research done by Etienne Stalmans and Saif El-Sherei. Executing code in MS Word can be complicated, in some cases requiring the use of Macros or memory corruption. Fortunately, Microsoft has a built in a feature that we can abuse to have the same effect. The best part, it does so without raising any User Account Control security warnings. Let's look at how it's done.