Think back to when you last wanted to transfer some music or videos to your friend's smartphone and how difficult and slow it was. As powerful as our phones are, the default file sharing options are limited. There are, fortunately, some better options which make moving files e ...more
Net neutrality is dead and your internet service providers can collect all the data they want. While VPNs are a great way to protect some of that privacy, they're not perfect. There is another option, though, called Noisy, which was created by Itay Hury. It floods your ISP wit ...more
If you need to hack an Android device, try a remote administration tool. Known more familiarly as a RAT, there are open-source RATs that are barebones and exorbitantly priced RATs that are more polished. There are also low-cost and polished RATs that aren't intended to be RATs ...more
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 mit ...more
You've protected your Ubuntu system from physical attacks, annoyed network hackers, and sandboxed potentially malicious applications. Great! Now, the next logical steps to locking down your OS include thoroughly auditing Ubuntu for weak points, using antivirus software that re ...more
There's always an iPhone in our list of top phones for privacy and security, due in large part to advanced security measures like Face ID, consistent iOS updates, and easy ways to prevent unwanted access and excessive data sharing. However, some of those options actually do th ...more
This year's big iPhone update, iOS 12, aims to solve many of the issues that arose during iOS 11's controversial, buggy tenure. With that in mind, it may be tempting to jump on board the new software immediately and leave iOS 11 in the dust for good. Here are some reasons why ...more
Apple released iOS 12 on Sept. 17, and most of the announced features have been released for the iPhone's latest available operating system. However, some brand new features can be accessed with Apple's latest beta, iOS 12.4. If you want to try out all its new features before ...more
With the macOS stager created and the attacker's system hosting the Empire listener, the malicious AppleScript can be designed and disguised to appear as a legitimate PDF using a few Unicode and icon manipulation tricks. A real PDF is required for the attack to work. Files ov ...more
Over the years, we've seen security breach after security breach, as well as high-profile data scandals where collected personal information was misused by companies. Apple makes customer privacy a priority, so there have been few issues to worry about when it comes to its ser ...more
The conversation of which operating system is most secure, macOS vs. Windows, is an ongoing debate. Most will say macOS is more secure, but I'd like to weigh in by showing how to backdoor a MacBook in less than two minutes and maintain a persistent shell using tools already bu ...more
Smartphones are still "phones," which means communicating with others is usually a primary use. Ranging from a simple "hi" to a more personal conversation and even sharing passwords, our messages should remain private so that only the intended recipient sees their content. Whi ...more
We know Android 9.0 will have the formal designation of Pie, following Google's age-old tradition of naming their OS after items you'd normally find on a dessert menu. And thanks to a slew of new features that centers around your overall security, P could also stand for Privac ...more
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 ...more
Kali Linux is known as being the de facto penetration-testing Linux distribution but can be a pain to use as an everyday OS — even more of a pain if that means carrying around a second laptop or the constant frustration of using the finicky Wi-Fi on virtual machines. But there ...more
To name just a few companies, VK, µTorrent, and ClixSense all suffered significant data breaches at some point in the past. The leaked password databases from those and other online sites can be used to understand better how human-passwords are created and increase a hacker's ...more
After setting up your phone, there are a number of things you should do immediately before download your favorite apps. Specifically, now that your data is on the device, you need to take steps now to ensure it's both protected and retained. Fortunately, most of these steps ar ...more
While installing the new Android 9.0 Developer Preview is fairly easy if you're using a Windows machine, it's a little trickier if you want to use macOS instead. To help you get the latest Android OS on your Google Pixel phone, we'll break down the whole process so using your ...more
Even though most phones don't have Oreo yet, Google has released Android 9.0 Pie. It's available on Google's own Pixel devices, and updates should soon be available to partnered devices from Essential, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi. We're already digging into it to highl ...more
While it may not be an obvious feature, Apple actually built a way into iOS that lets you hide specific pictures and videos in the Photos app that you want to keep on the down-low, for your eyes only. If you show off your photos a lot or stream slideshows to your TV, this is a ...more
After testing a series of Android 8.0 builds, Essential hit the reset button and jumped to Android 8.1 Oreo. The beta program didn't last long, as Essential has now released the official 8.1 update to the masses. The features from the 8.0 betas are all still there, plus a few ...more
As of 2016, there are approximately 1.85 billion Android smartphones worldwide. This growing popularity has led to an increasing number hacks and cyber attacks against the OS. Unfortunately, Android users need more protection than what is offered by Google. The good thing is t ...more
Over the years, the internet has become a dangerous place. As its popularity has increased, it has attracted more hackers looking to make a quick buck. However, as our dependency on the web grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to sever all ties. This means we have to prote ...more
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 ...more
OpenBSD implements security in its development in a way that no other operating system on the planet does. Learning to use the Unix-like operating system can help a hacker understand secure development, create better servers, and improve their understanding of the BSD operatin ...more
For all those times when an app either isn't available or simply won't cut it, your phone's internet browser provides access to your favorite websites and services. But some browsers are flat-out better than others, and chances are, the browser that came pre-installed on your ...more
There's a new macOS vulnerability that hackers within physical reach of your computer can use to gain root access to your system and accounts. Just by using "root" as the username and a blank password on a privilege escalation prompt, someone can install malware on your comput ...more
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 fetch ...more
Root, TWRP, Xposed, Magisk, custom ROMs — before you can have any of these, the first thing you should do is unlock your bootloader. Thankfully, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are some of the most modder-friendly phones out there, so you only need to send a single fastboot command ...more
Ransomware is software that encrypts a victim's entire hard drive, blocking access to their files unless they pay a ransom to the attacker to get the decryption key. In this tutorial, you'll learn how easy it is to use the USB Rubber Ducky, which is disguised as an ordinary fl ...more
In October of 2017, Mathy Vanhoef released "Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2." This paper demonstrates a way to decrypt traffic on practically any WPA2 network, the most commonly used form of wireless security (seeing as all other forms of Wi-Fi encrypti ...more
Barrow's article on Pupy made me wish for a RAT that could target an OS frequently used by gatekeepers at startups, tech companies, and creative firms: macOS. Once run, a RAT can do severe damage by dumping a user's stored credentials for many accounts. The best loot lives in ...more
Your iPhone has a lot of personal information contained within it, so of course you want your device to be secure. You don't want that information getting into the wrong hands — or any hands other than your own, for that matter. This guide breaks down the new privacy settings ...more
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, are popular for helping you stay anonymous online by changing your IP address, encrypting traffic, and hiding your location. However, common IoT devices, media players, and smart TVs are hard to connect to a VPN, but we have a solution: Turn ...more
During a penetration test, one of the most important aspects of engaging a target is information gathering. The more information you have coming into an attack, the more likely the attack is to succeed. In this article, I'll be looking at SpiderFoot, a modular cross-platform O ...more
Apple's iOS 11 is finally here, and while they showed off several of the new features it brings to your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch back at WWDC 2017, they've only just touched the surface of what iOS 11 has to offer. There are a lot of cool new (and sometimes secret) feature ...more
In 2013, Offensive Security released Kali Linux, a rebuild of BackTrack Linux derived from Debian. Since then, Kali has gone on to become somewhat of a standard for penetration testing. It comes preconfigured with a collection of tools accessible by a menu system, tied togethe ...more
A PirateBox creates a network that allows users to communicate wirelessly, connecting smartphones and laptops even when surrounding infrastructure has been disabled on purpose or destroyed in a disaster. Using a Raspberry Pi, we will make a wireless offline server that hosts f ...more
Aircraft equipped with ADS-B are constantly shouting their location into the radio void, along with other useful unauthenticated and unencrypted data. In this guide, we will make an ADS-B receiver using a Raspberry Pi with a software-defined radio (SDR) dongle, which we can us ...more
The dark web is an intimidating place for a newbie hacker, but it's a powerful tool once you've learned to navigate it safely. To help you out with that, this guide will cover some need-to-know information for traversing the dark corners of the internet while keeping your iden ...more
Recently, I ran across SecGen, a project which allows a user to create random vulnerable machines. I absolutely love vulnerable machines, since a vulnerable VM is a safe and legal way to practice hacking tactics, test out new tools, and exercise your puzzle-solving skills. Wh ...more
Airgeddon is a multi-Bash network auditor capable of Wi-Fi jamming. This capability lets you target and disconnect devices from a wireless network, all without joining it. It runs on Kali, and we'll cover installing, configuring, and using its jamming functionalities on a smal ...more
If you need a tiny, flexible attack platform for raining down human-interface-device (HID) attacks on unattended computers, the USB Rubber Ducky is the most popular tool for the job. By loading the Ducky with custom firmware, you can design new attacks to be effective against ...more
Jailbreaking gives iPhone users almost unfettered access to their devices, offering a slew of customizations, new features, and improved apps that you just can't get elsewise. Unfortunately, Apple has clamped down hard on the latest iterations of iOS, making jailbreaking extre ...more
Kodi, formerly known as XBMC, is one of the most versatile media players available. With it, you can play virtually any internet and media file in a large variety of formats, and it can be used on practically every single operating system out there, including iOS 10. Kodi, an ...more
Metasploit is an extremely popular pentesting tool capable of enumeration, exploitation, and injecting shell code, and is a part of almost every hacking toolkit. So there's no way I could leave this out of our series on getting your Mac set up for hacking. Luckily for those o ...more
We're nearly done getting our Mac set up for hacking. If you haven't checked out previous tutorials, I'd recommend you do so first before diving right into this one. While macOS is a powerful POSIX-compliant operating system, some of our Linux tools do not work out of the box ...more
While it hasn't gotten as much attention as iOS 10, Apple's big 10.12 update to their Mac operating system is finally out for all to enjoy—and you can download it for free from the Mac App Store right now. Don't Miss: 60+ Cool New Features in iOS 10 Siri is definitely the m ...more
The new iOS 10 won't be released to the public until September 13 via an OTA update, but the Gold Master edition is available right now. Essentially, it's the same version that Apple will release on the 13th, but only for developers so they can get their apps up to snuff befor ...more
You may not know what HTTP is exactly, but you definitely know that every single website you visit starts with it. Without the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, there'd be no easy way to view all the text, media, and data that you're able to see online. However, all communication b ...more
Greetings my fellow hackers, In the previous article, I discussed briefly about ransomwares and their devastating capabilities. Devastating in a way that ransomwares are not only known to encrypt files but to also lockout some specific functions of the system and hold it up f ...more
Now that smartphones have ensured that we're connected to the internet 24/7, online privacy has become more important than ever. With data-mining apps hoping to sell your information for targeted ads, and government agencies only one subpoena away from knowing every detail of ...more
Whether you want to edit photos, compress files, play games, or DJ your next party, there's a free Mac app that can help you out. But things can get annoying real fast if you download a lot of free apps from the Mac App Store, since you have to type in your Apple ID password e ...more
OS X is built upon a UNIX foundation, which grants you access to the benefits that UNIX offers, including the standard toolkit (make, gcc, clang, git, perl, svn, size, strings, id, and a lot more) via the command line developer tools, which are an essential if you're a develop ...more
If you've been around computers long enough, you've probably heard the phrase "have you tried turning it off and on again?" This trick usually works because it forces your computer to empty out the contents of its RAM and disk caches when you restart. When you run programs an ...more
When you hand your unlocked iPhone to somebody so they can use the internet real quick, check out some cool photos, or do whatever, there's a possibility that they could snoop around where they don't belong. If you have some secret recipes, login credentials, intellectual prop ...more
Greetings my fellow hackers. As you may have noticed by my lack of posts, I've been away for a while working on a big project with a team (which won't be finished anytime soon), and I have also been putting together a small side project for Null-Byte that I will be announcing ...more
Greetings all. Before I get into the tutorial, I would like to mention that I am fairly new to Null Byte (been lurking for some time though), and what really appeals to me about this place is its tight, family-like community where everyone is always willing to help each other ...more
Hello all! In this tutorial, I'd like to show you one way of getting root on OS X. Check out this GitHub page for a recent privilege escalation exploit that was recently discovered. I've tested it and it works on both OS X 10.9 Mavericks and OS X 10.10 Yosemite, but appears to ...more
You can beef up the security on your Mac all you want, but all the firewalls and antivirus apps in the world mean nothing when that can of soda tips over on your Macbook, destroying your laptop and all its data forever. You may have some of your data backed up to a cloud serv ...more