Hacker Handle

In the series of wifi hacking, I have already covered WPA handshake capture and social engineering . In this post I present to you yet another attack using a novel approach for gaining access to a network: it is based on the WPS protocol and is known as the Pixie-Dust attack. You will find a step-by-step guide after a short explanation of the theory behind the security flaw hereby discussed.

In many rural regions across the world, cellular signals are very weak or inexistent at all, rendering any communication other than face-to-face impossible. This constitutes a big obstacle in most situations where a group of people needs to exchange information. Fortunately, there exists a way to overcome this problem. Setting up your own mobile network might seem out of reach at first glance, but it is in fact very attainable with a Raspberry Pi and some specific tools. Of course, the resulting network will be limited in range as the configuration lacks any relay antenna, but it will allow you and your hypothetic team to communicate with your smartphones, either by text messages or by voice. Being able to build such a network is a tremendously valuable skill that will prove to be useful in several situations: natural disasters, large-scale protests, trips to secluded areas with no coverage… In this post and the next one, I will describe the process of creating a Wifi access point,...

A text editor is where a script coder or hacker spends most of his time. Choosing one that we master and feel comfortable with is therefore a crucial factor affecting productivity and speed. A common mistake is made by new hackers: they find a text editor with a GUI and jump towards it because it's simple and similar to standard editors. This is a bad practice because they'll find only later that the capabilities of such editors are limited. It is recommended to start with a more advanced text editor since day one, even if this requires more effort, time and dedication to master. Today we'll talk about Vim, short for Vi Improved, a text editor that has earned the reputation of the most powerful editor out there. Vim, the friendly beast that scared newbies The very first thing we notice about Vim is that it doesn't have a GUI. Instead, it runs entirely in a terminal window. Add to this the lack of functionality for the mouse -- all interaction is done through the ke...

Perhaps the most important skill a hacker should master is programming. This is what makes the true difference between "hackers" and "script kiddies". The latter lacks the knowledge to write his own script: he rather uses programs made by others to attack his target. In contrast, a worthy hacker builds his own program tailored to his needs in order to exploit a specific vulnerability. Does that mean that a hacker never uses material written by others? Of course not. As most of the exploits (i.e. scripts that exploit a flaw) written by/for the Linux community are open-source, hackers often reverse-engineer these programs to understand how they work and potentially modify them to suit their own needs. What's more, when building his own script, a hacker very often integrates some tool from a fellow hacker. This is precisely how malware evolves on a daily basis: a programmer uses his know-how to combine multiple exploits in an effective way. Writing your firs...