Root

Nearly two years ago, Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, confirmed that the company would no longer be locking bootloaders. Whether or not they've actually lived up to this claim is debatable. Any phone bought from a wireless carrier comes locked. Only the new HTC One Developer Edition s ...more

Sense 6 is great, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I start to miss the vanilla Android experience that comes with Nexus devices. You can always convert your M8 to the Google Play Edition, but then you'd have to ditch all the Sense exclusive features, and we wouldn't want that ...more

With a simple social engineering trick, sudo passwords can be captured in seconds without the target's knowledge. The passwords can then be saved to a file or exfiltrated to another computer on the network. After exploiting a system, penetration tester's and hackers will ofte ...more

We need to take our privacy and security much more seriously. Whether it's malware-infected apps or the mishandling of our data by companies like Facebook, there are threats all around us in this digital world. Fortunately, some smartphones are simply designed to protect us be ...more

Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers! I've been writing these Linux tutorials in an attempt to fill the void in the education of some aspiring hackers into the Linux operating system. There is a lot to know, and in this tutorial, we'll look at Linux file permissions. Step 1: Ch ...more

If you've ever seen one of those Samsung commercials from about a year back, you know that the Galaxy S series of phones come with a feature that allows you to do certain things by making gestures in front of your screen. They call this feature Air Gesture, and it enables you ...more

Some manufacturers, like Samsung and LG, have had split-screen multitasking on their custom versions of Android for years. But starting with Android Nougat, Google added this functionality to AOSP, which means that all phones and tablets running Android 7.0 or higher will now ...more

Let's face it — our phones are our heart and soul. We do everything on them, from banking to media consumption. However, sometimes we download apps that we don't want others to see. Sometimes, we wish to hide apps so that, in the rare times we lend our phone to someone, we don ...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

Google recently updated the camera software for the Nexus 5, and in doing so, made the app available to all devices running Android KitKat. This means that not only do we get a nice new camera interface on our phones, but we also get the benefit of an expanded development comm ...more

The first thing you'll always have to do before getting your customization game on with most phones is to unlock the bootloader. Doing so opens the true potential of the device, allowing you to root, install TWRP, Magisk, custom ROMs, and other mods. No matter your wants or ne ...more

Welcome back, my novice hackers! In a recent tutorial, I showed how the SNMP protocol can be a gold mine of information for reconnaissance on a potential target. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest that you read it before progressing here, as little of this will make m ...more

The more we use our smartphones, the more storage space becomes occupied—it's an inescapable fact. But as the data accumulates and chokes off our storage, it can become difficult to identify exactly which files are occupying the most space. So the development team at Nexrad S ...more

If you've updated your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 to a version of iOS 7, iOS 8, or even iOS 9, you've probably noticed that its performance is a little more sluggish than it was back when it had iOS 6 and lower on it. Now, thanks to a tutorial from tihmstar, you can downgrade the op ...more

With protests springing up across America, there's a chance you may have your first interaction with law enforcement. Many demonstrators will have their phones in-hand to film the action, which, sadly, could prompt an officer to demand the device and any self-incriminating dat ...more

The launch of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was also the launch of Google Now, a service that was supposed to one-up Siri, the resident personal assistant for iOS devices. Google Now offered enticing features, but its launch went unnoticed by a great many Android users. But that was ...more

After the Galaxy Note 3 firmware updated to NF4, Samsung decided to remove the option to hide apps in the app drawer, replacing it with an uninstall/disable feature instead. Before, with the hide feature, you could simply hide third-party apps that were barely used or that you ...more

Privacy has been a heated topic in recent months, with everyone now up in arms over unauthorized leaks and exposures. And guess what—tablet and smartphone users are just as vulnerable. Remember, the Google Play Store is unfiltered, so malware can just as easily make its way o ...more

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 en ...more

Codenamed "Nougat" after the sugary stuff that fills your Snickers bar, Android 7.0 is living up to its name with tons of sweet features. There's almost too many changes over Marshmallow to cover in one go, with new functionality ranging from a revamped Doze Mode for battery s ...more

We just keep discovering hidden features and settings scattered throughout the Galaxy S8's system like little digital Easter eggs that were largely left unadvertised. One such setting is an option that lets you change the placement of your S8's display brightness slider. Thou ...more

ADB and Fastboot are powerful tools that have always required a computer. But with the right setup, you can now send commands to a phone using another phone. The ADB and Fastboot Magisk module, by osm0sis and Surge1223, will turn your phone into an ADB terminal using root acc ...more

Changing an app's name on your home screen is not something you can do on stock Android or TouchWiz, but it should be. If you think of it merely from a customization angle, sure, it's not a big deal, but having the ability to alter an app shortcut's name can do wonders for cle ...more

Dutch filmmaker Anthony Van der Meer published his 2015 thesis short from Willem de Kooning Academy in South Holland online in December 2016. It's a brilliant piece of work that managed to be touching, alarming, and informative at the same time. His documentary, which already ...more

Last week marked the announcement of LG's new G3 smartphone, and with it came a ton of new features and improvements to their Optimus UI. While most manufacturers put little effort into their keyboards—probably due to the attraction of third-party alternatives—LG has made thei ...more

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 a ...more

The Windows 10 desktop and microphone can be livestreamed without using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) software and without opening any ports on the target computer. A hacker with low user privileges can monitor and exfiltrate a target's every move and private conversation in r ...more

Due to its enormously awesome size, the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 usually takes two hands to maneuver through photos and texts, write emails, and get directions on the map. Even simple tasks like zooming in and out require a couple hands; one to hold the device and one to do the ...more

It's often the smallest details that determine your overall experience with a smartphone. Unlocking your device with a PIN is an example — and iPhones have had a leg up over Android thanks to their automatic unlocking. Thankfully, this era has finally come to an end with the a ...more

Random vibrations, ghost buzzing — whatever you call it, when your phone goes off for seemingly no reason, it's pretty frustrating. Finding the source of a phantom vibration can be almost impossible if there's no associated notification, especially given the myriad apps and sy ...more

Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers! This tutorial will be the fourtenth in the Linux for hackers series and will focus on the MySQL database. Although this is not strictly a Linux tutorial, MySQL is the database of choice on most Linux distributions. In addition, it is the mo ...more

With Geohot's Towelroot allowing us to root our Nexus devices in under a minute without ever leaving Android, many of you are probably enjoying all of the Gadget Hacks that root access has unlocked. But some tweaks, such as interface themes and Custom ROMs, come in the form o ...more

Hello everyone! Hope everyone having good day!! I wanted to share an easy way to locate an appropriate exploit from the EDB, get it compiled, and run it all from inside the terminal. A copy of every exploit listed on the Exploit Database, is already saved to our file systems. ...more

The Fire TV Stick, as well as the Fire TV, may be limited by Amazon's fight on piracy, but after a quick sideloading of Kodi, the floodgates are back open with the freedom to stream just about any video or song you want. This is a great new feature to have, but with the locke ...more

Conducting phishing campaigns and hosting Metasploit sessions from a trusted VPS is important to any professional security researcher, pentester, or white hat hacker. However, the options are quite limited since most providers have zero-tolerance policies for any kind of hacki ...more

When Yosemite was released, a more detailed boot screen came to your Mac. So now, just like on Apple's mobile devices, you will see a loading bar telling you how far into the startup process you are. Apple also decided to add a black version of this boot screen to newer Macs, ...more

You've probably already figured out that your Nexus 7 doesn't have a rear camera, but that doesn't mean you can't do some awesome things with your tablet's front camera! Sure, the front-facing camera is only 1.2MP, but that doesn't mean it sucks. In fact, there's a cool mod f ...more

The Google Cast feature that serves as the primary interface for the Chromecast and comes bundled with Android TV devices like the Nexus Player is a marvel of modern technology. But as these things go, troubleshooting issues can be difficult with something so groundbreaking, e ...more

The Nexus 6 has an AMOLED screen that uses virtually no power to display black pixels. To take advantage of this feature, Google included an Ambient Display notification system that shows a black and white version of your lock screen when you get a new message. As a result, th ...more

How do I get rid of these zits?! Whether its pimples, blackheads, or whiteheads, the name is the same, and the name is acne. If you have acne, you are not alone. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, about 50 million people are impacted by acne vulgaris each year. ...more

Kali Linux has come a long way since its BackTrack days, and it's still widely considered the ultimate Linux distribution for penetration testing. The system has undergone quite the transformation since its old days and includes an updated look, improved performance, and some ...more

All across the web, you'll find guides on setting up various apps and mods for your Android device—but while these are certainly useful, they all seem to be working under the assumption that the reader has a certain level of knowledge about Android. For someone that's just get ...more

There's over 20 million people out there who use Ubuntu as their main operating system, and the number is steadily increasing due to its thriving community. While it's easy enough to download Ubuntu on your PC, the process to get it on your mobile devices can be fairly more di ...more

Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! One of the issues we often encounter with Metasploit is how to add new modules. Although Rapid7 (Metasploit's owner and developer) periodically updates Metasploit with new exploits, payloads, and other modules, at times, new modules appear ...more

To reduce stress on internet bandwidth during the COVID-19 pandemic that the novel coronavirus is causing, Google decided to set YouTube's default video quality to 480p. That said, even when you could stream at HD quality without adjusting anything, you still couldn't switch t ...more

Welcome back, my aspiring hackers! One of the areas that often gives Linux newcomers problems are the environment variables. Although Windows systems have environment variables, most users, and for that matter, most administrators, never manage their environment variables. To ...more

Personality is something we're constantly attempting to inject into our lives, whether it be the car we drive or clothing we wear—and our mobile devices are no exception. As previously shown, it's extremely easy to add various soft key styles to the LG G3, and now we're going ...more

Hi guys. Hope you all had a good Christmas , today i have a tutorial for you. If you brick you device it's not my fault I will show you how to build the new version of NetHunter and install it to your device(must be a supported device,,see the list below) Nexus 4(mako) Nexu ...more

One of the best ways to improve your skills as a hacker is to learn to combine different avenues of attack to achieve success. What if it were possible to get a victim to connect to our machine and execute a chosen payload on our behalf? This is indeed possible with the almigh ...more

Google's Pixel phones claimed the top spot in our ranking of the best phones for rooting, but they do have one drawback from a modder's perspective: Because of their A/B partition layout for seamless updates, the devices don't have official support for Magisk. Thankfully, thou ...more

When Snapchat first hit it big, people just assumed it'd be used for seedy activities. And while that's not completely true, it's definitely true sometimes. For those moments when you need to take a sneaky screenshot that doesn't notify the sender, Android has plenty of ways t ...more

The build.prop file in an Android device is home to many system-level values and settings. Everything from screen density to video recording quality is covered in this file, and people have been editing these entries to get new functionality and better performance since Androi ...more

Upon getting the new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge here at the office, there are countless things we wanted to do before actually diving in and using the device. One of those things is removing all of the unnecessary pre-installed applications we never asked for. While Samsung did a ...more

The Nexus 7 is a huge jump in screen size when coming from a phone, but obviously this tablet is still smaller than some of the major players such as the Nexus 10, Galaxy Tab, etc. One way to squeeze out a little more space is to eliminate the navigation and status bars. Nels ...more

Welcome back, my nascent hackers! We have spent a lot of time in previous tutorials focused on hacking the ubiquitous Windows systems, but the vast majority of "heavy iron" around the world are Linux or Unix systems. Linux and Unix dominate the world of Internet web servers w ...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