Null Byte Features

How To: Use Banner Grabbing to Aid in Reconnaissance & See What Services Are Running on the System

As we've seen with other tools and utilities, administrators typically use certain things to do their job more efficiently, and those things are often abused by attackers for exploitation. After all, hacking is just the process of getting a computer to do things in unexpected ways. Today, we will be covering various methods to perform banner grabbing to learn more about the target system.

How To: Securely Sync Files Between Two Machines Using Syncthing

Transferring hundreds of screenshots, webcam recordings, keystroke logs, and audio recordings between your VPS and a local Kali machine can be tricky. Services like Dropbox don't always have the best privacy policies and suffer data breaches just like any other website. To mitigate these risks, we'll use a secure, open source, and decentralized alternative.

Hack Like a Pro: How to Build Your Own Exploits, Part 3 (Fuzzing with Spike to Find Overflows)

Welcome back, my hacker novitiates! In the previous two posts in this series, we looked at the basics of buffer overflows. In this post, we will look at one technique for finding buffer overflows. We will try to send random, oversized, and invalid data at a variable to see whether we can make it crash or overflow. This process is known as fuzzing. It is often the first step to developing an exploit, as we need to find some variable that is susceptible to overflowing.

Analyzing the Hacks: The Girl in the Spider's Web Explained

The latest film addition in the American-produced Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web, was just released on Blu-ray a few days ago. As you could expect, the movie has many hacking scenes throughout, just like the previous English and Swedish language movies centered around hacker Lisbeth Salander. Of course, with the quick pace of some scenes, the hacks can be hard to follow.

How To: Advanced Techniques to Bypass & Defeat XSS Filters, Part 2

Cross-site scripting can be one of the easiest vulnerabilities to discover, but to be successful with this type of attack, it is essential to learn how to get past filters. In the previous guide, we explored some ways to do this, such as abusing attributes and event handlers and tricking the application into accepting unusual characters. Now, let's take a look at more techniques used to defeat filters.

How To: Writing 64-Bit Shellcode - Part 1 (Beginner Assembly)

In this simple tutorial you will be shown step-by-step how to write local shellcode for use on 64-Bit Linux systems. Shellcode is simple code, usually written in assembly that is used as payload in exploits such as buffer overflow attacks. Payloads are the arrow head of an exploit: though the rest of the arrow is important for the delivery of the attack, the arrow head deals the killing blow. In reality, payloads are slightly less exciting yet far more interesting and intelligent than medieva...

Hack Like a Pro: Digital Forensics for the Aspiring Hacker, Part 10 (Identifying Signatures of a Port Scan & DoS Attack)

Welcome back, my budding hackers! As I have mentioned many times throughout this series, knowing a bit of digital forensics might keep you out of a lot of trouble. In addition, digital forensics is a burgeoning and high paying career. Some knowledge and certifications in this field will likely help you land a Security Engineer position or put you on the Incident Response Team at your employer.

News: The Hacking of Blackhat, the Movie

A while back, I wrote review of my favorite hacking movies of all time. Two of my key criteria were; (1) how realistic was the hacking, and (2) are the hackers portrayed as the "good guys." This past winter, a new hacker movie was released, appropriately named Blackhat starring Chris Hemsworth (from Thor fame) as a blackhat hacker who is released from prison to stop a notorious and destructive hacker that only he can stop. Although the movie did very poorly at the box office, I thought it was...

How To: Hack UnrealIRCd Using Python Socket Programming

UnrealIRCd is an open-source IRC server that has been around since 1999 and is perhaps the most widely used one today. Version 3.2.8.1 was vulnerable to remote code execution due to a backdoor in the software. Today, we will be exploiting the vulnerability with Metasploit, examining the underlying code to understand it, and creating our own version of the exploit in Python.

Hack Like a Pro: How to Create a Nearly Undetectable Backdoor with Cryptcat

Welcome back, my fledgling hackers! Awhile back, I demonstrated one of my favorite little tools, netcat, which enables us to create a connection between any two machines and transfer files or spawn a command shell for "owning" the system. Despite the beauty and elegance of this little tool, it has one major drawback—the transfers between the computers can be detected by security devices such as firewalls and an intrusion detection system (IDS).

Hack Like a Pro: How to Remotely Grab Encrypted Passwords from a Compromised Computer

Welcome back, my fledgling hackers! There's an evil dictator hellbent on destroying the world, and in one of our last hacks, we successfully compromised his computer and saved the world from nuclear annihilation. Then, we covered our tracks so no one would know what we did, and developed a hack to capture screenshots of his computer periodically so we could track of what he was up to next.

Hack Like a Pro: How to Evade AV Software with Shellter

Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! One key area on the minds of all hackers is how to evade security devices such as an intrusion detection system (IDS) or antivirus (AV) software. This is not an issue if you create your own zero-day exploit, or capture someone else's zero-day. However, if you are using someone else's exploit or payload, such as one from Metasploit or Exploit-DB, the security devices are likely to detect it and spoil all your fun.

How To: Use SSH Local Port Forwarding to Pivot into Restricted Networks

SSH is a powerful tool with more uses than simply logging into a server. This protocol, which stands for Secure Shell, provides X11 forwarding, port forwarding, secure file transfer, and more. Using SSH port forwarding on a compromised host with access to a restricted network can allow an attacker to access hosts within the restricted network or pivot into the network.