Search results

If you have bought a Wi-Fi router in the last several years, you have probably seen beamforming listed as a feature. The advertising usually shows the same thing: a router spraying Wi-Fi everywhere, then magically narrowing that RF energy into a beam pointed directly at a laptop or phone. I...

When a network isn't behaving the way it should, Wireshark is one of the most useful tools you can have. Wireshark is a free, open-source network protocol analyzer. It captures network traffic and lets you inspect individual packets instead of relying on what an application, operating system...

Surfshark confirmed a security incident after an unauthorized party gained access to one of the company's internal engineering test servers. According to Surfshark, the server had been misconfigured and made reachable from the Internet. The intruder accessed limited internal engineering...

A file named ScreenConnect Patcher V3.exe has appeared in malware-analysis databases, and the results aren't encouraging. A recent Hybrid Analysis submission classified the Windows executable as malicious, assigning it a threat score of 64/100 and reporting 179 indicators. The analyzed file has...

Identity-verification company IDScan has confirmed that an unauthorized third party accessed customer information stored in its cloud platform. The incident gained attention after hackers advertised a database they claimed contained roughly 153 million driver's-license scans. IDScan has...

On September 12, Revolut confirmed that fraudulent requests appearing to come from a legitimate government-agency email domain caused it to disclose sensitive customer information. Reported exposed information included identity/contact data and potentially identity documents, verification...

AI has been useful for programming and cybersecurity for years, but GPT-6 Astra represents a significant change in what these systems can potentially do. OpenAI classifies Astra as reaching its Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework. According to OpenAI's...

SwitchSprint

For several hours, millions of users attempting to open Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp were met with errors, endless loading screens, or login failures. At first, it looked like another ordinary Meta outage. It wasn't. According to the fictional scenario presented here...

Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with journalists, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers tell 404 Media and WIRED they...

Before websites, social media, and broadband Internet, there were Bulletin Board Systems—or BBSes. A BBS was usually a computer sitting somewhere connected to one or more telephone lines through modems. You would tell your modem to dial the BBS's phone number, listen to the familiar screeching...

If you're working with networking, subnetting, or just learning how IPv4 addresses work at the binary level, the TI-84 Plus CE Python Edition can be turned into a handy little IP conversion tool. I wrote this simple Python program to enter an IPv4 address and convert each decimal octet into its...

Mine was, actually it was my brothers, Atari 130XE, but my first real one was an old IBM PS/2 Model 30 with a 10M/B hard drive. I'd love to hear what everyone started on, whether that's a Commodore 64, a Tandy, a Windows 95 tower, or a hand-me-down family PC. Bonus: what's the first thing you'd...

The ping tool was written by Mike Muuss in 1983 and named after the sound of sonar. The "Packet InterNet Groper" expansion came later as a backronym. Tech is full of names and conventions like this that stuck around. What's your favorite oddity, like a weird default, a strange port number, or a...

The famous story is that a moth found in a Harvard Mark II relay in 1947 gave us the word "bug." The truth is more interesting. Engineers were already using "bug" for glitches, and the logbook entry is funny because it was a literal bug. What's your favorite piece of computing history that turns...

Here's one of mine, a quick check for whether hosts are reachable on HTTPS: import socket hosts = ["snmlabs.net", "1.1.1.1"] for h in hosts: try: socket.create_connection((h, 443), timeout=3).close() print(f"{h}: up") except OSError: print(f"{h}: down") It's...

Refurbished business mini PCs (Dell OptiPlex Micro, Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, HP EliteDesk Mini) are cheap, quiet, and sip power compared to rack servers. They're a great fit for Proxmox, Pi-hole/AdGuard, or a small Docker host. What's the best hardware deal you've found, and what would you avoid...

Before you spin up a single VM in Azure or Google Cloud, create a budget with an email alert. It takes about two minutes and prevents the classic "I forgot a resource running and got a surprise bill" story. Also worth knowing: delete resource groups or projects when you're done, since that...

Licensing changes in the VMware world pushed a lot of home labbers to look at alternatives. I'm curious what people actually use: Proxmox, Hyper-V, ESXi, something else? Tell us your platform, what hardware it runs on, and one thing you'd do differently if you started over.

If you're studying for the CCNA, this is a great first lab. One router interface, one trunk, two VLANs. interface GigabitEthernet0/0.10 encapsulation dot1Q 10 ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 Set the switch port facing the router as a trunk, put hosts in VLANs 10 and 20, and they...