Hackercool Magazine January 2024

Hi all. Welcome to the first Issue of Hackercool Magazine for year 2024. After completing six editions, I thought it would be a good idea to reboot the content of the Magazine. Although, I have been thinking about this since few months now, I never had a clear picture. Recently, the picture became somewhat clearer and I decide the first Issue of Edition 7 would be a great place to start. As you read this Issue, you will see that it has two new features included and two old features brought back. The first new feature you will read is “Initial Access”. Initial Access, as its name implies features the file formats and types of vulnerabilities being used by Black Hat Hackers in real world to gain initial access to…

Come 2024 and we have decided to reboot your Hackercool Magazine. As a part of this reboot, a new feature was given birth to. It is named “Initial Access”. In this feature we bring readers the knowledge about the files or vectors used By Black Hat hackers to gain initial access to a target machine or the target network. Macros have been one of Black Hat Hacker’s favorite vector to gain initial access before Microsoft banned macros by default in 2022. But there are still cases of macros being used by APT’s and Threat Actors around the world. Of course, with a bit of social engineering. For the first article in feature “Initial Access”, we want to teach how to create PowerPoint Macros to our readers. PowerPoint macros were detected…

I think before telling you any story, it is important to know about different characters involved in it. So here we go. What is Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG)? When you are writing story on hacking it is not compulsory that all the actors involved should be humans. Sometimes, it can be software or even hardware as you will see. An Email Security Gateway (ESG) is an email security solution that scans for any malicious content in the email received by the organization before they are read by the company’s employees Usually, these are placed to receive the emails first in line. Barracuda ESG is one such appliance used by many companies worldwide. Our next character is UNC4841. Usually, threat actors and APTs are named by Google owned Mandiant. UNC4841…

“Infection Chain” is another new feature added to the Hackercool Magazine as part of the REBOOT. You have seen a few infection chains (also known as attack chain) already in our previous Issues, especially in the Issue with a feature on ROKRAT. But that article on different infection chains was so big or that no matter how hard we tried to focus on the minute details, it was going to leave some edges uncovered. In the first article of this feature we want our readers to specifically understand what an infection chain is. So, let’s start. What is an infection chain? In almost all the hacking tutorials on internet you see, they create a payload which is most probably an executable, copy it to the target system and click on…

DNSenum is a multithreaded perl script that is used to gather information from target DNS servers. The features of DNSenum are, 1.Get the host’s address (A record). 2.Get the nameservers (NS). 3.Get the MX record (MX). 4.Perform axfr queries on nameservers and get BIND VERSION. 5.Get extra names and subdomains via google scraping (google query = "-www site:domain"). 6.Brute force subdomains from file, can also perform recursion on subdomain that have NS records. 7.Calculate C class domain network ranges and perform whois queries on them. 8.Perform reverse lookups on netranges (C class or/and whois netranges). Let’s see how to perform DNS enumeration with DNSenum. DNSenum is included by default in Kali Linux. If you want to enumerate a domain with DNSenum. all you have to do is supply a domain…

Oli Buckley Professor of Cyber Security, University of East Anglia Jason R.C. Nurse Associate Professor in Cyber Security, University of Kent Artificial intelligence (AI) tools aimed at the general public, such as ChatGPT, Bard, CoPilot and Dall-E have incredible potential to be used for good. The benefits range from an enhanced ability by doctors to diagnose disease, to expanding access to professional and academic expertise. But those with criminal intentions could also exploit and subvert these technologies, posing a threat to ordinary citizens. Criminals are even creating their own AI chatbots, to support hacking and scams. AI’s potential for wide-ranging risks and threats is underlined by the publication of the UK government’s Generative AI Framework and the National Cyber Security Centre’s guidance on the potential impacts of AI on online…