How to Enable Full-Screen Display for Kali Linux on Hyper-V

A few days ago, I decided to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and instead of using the Home edition, I went ahead and paid to upgrade to the Pro version. Why? Because I wanted to see what the Hyper-V virtual machine management system is all about. Hyper-V has been fantastic for me at the moment. There doesn’t seem to be much lag, and connectivity works great. However, I was presented with one annoying issue: one of my Linux distros, namely Kali Linux, was stuck on a small screen resolution that didn’t seem to want to fix itself. The Initial Problem Getting Kali Linux to be fullscreen was initially difficult due to the unfortunate fact that there seemed to be limited resources on fixing this matter. Show in the picture above was the actual size of my screen and it made using a lot of the tools difficult with a screen at that size. Step 1: Installing and Using xrandr The first step I took was to install xrandr. You can think of xrandr as a command-line utility that…

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Breathing New Life into My Old Lenovo Laptop: The Journey to Building a Personal Home lab.

It was around August in 2014, and I had just graduated from high school and started attending a local community college to begin my post-secondary education journey. I took up a job, which happened to be my first job, at McDonald's, making minimum wage in my state of Alabama and mostly working the night shifts on the weekends. I didn’t earn much, but I was able to make anywhere from $150 to $280 per month from working there. At this time, I had an old Asus laptop that was on its last legs. It was unfortunately made of plastic and could not go above 4GB of RAM due to limitations put in place by ASUS for this specific laptop. Needless to say, it would have been tough to even repair this laptop or use it for what I wanted to use it for. I really wanted my own laptop and also something I could buy with my own money. That was when I noticed the Lenovo Y50-70 and began to feel like the kid who wanted the Red Ryder BB…

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Beware: Physical Letter Scams Targeting Executives Impersonating BianLian Group

On March 6th, 2025, the FBI dropped a heads-up about a sneaky scam hitting mailboxes across the U.S. This time, it’s not your typical email phishing nonsense — crooks are sending physical letters to corporate bigwigs, pretending to be the infamous BianLian Group. You know, those ransomware pros who’ve been making headlines for all the wrong reasons? Thing is, there’s no solid proof these letters actually come from BianLian. Seems like some opportunists are just borrowing the name to sound scary. The game plan here is pretty obvious: trick executives — the folks who can sign off on big money moves — into wiring cash straight to the scammers. It’s a bold phishing play, skipping the usual “encrypt your files” ransomware routine for something more old-school. And honestly, that’s what makes it so wild — it’s a letter you can hold, not just some sketchy link in your inbox. So, what’s a corporate exec supposed to do when the mail turns into a minefield? First off, get everyone in the company clued in with some solid cybersecurity training. I’m talking…

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AI and Deepfake Threats: A Security Professional’s Perspective

By now you have probably used Artificial Intelligence in one way or another. All around us we are starting to see our society seemingly embrace the rise of AI and how it is being incorporated into our daily life. Major companies, such as xAI, are pumping millions and even billions into data centers, and companies that we have come to use in our daily basis are suddenly releasing products with AI built in. When it comes to Information Security it is no different in the embrace of AI. For example, just a few days ago, Kali Linux released Kali GPT which is built into the operating system and meant to help penetration tests. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence seemingly being used in our daily life it does raise an important concern. Moreover, there are many great benefits of AI but what about the dangers? Threat actors are not individuals who rest and if there is an opportunity to use AI for their own selfish benefit then there are chances that they will use it. The Rise of Deep Fakes…

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How one Password Vault Mistake Could Expose All Your Accounts

Almost anyone who uses a computer or other device with an operating system will require passwords in order to gain access to the resources on the device or on the internet. For many of us, including myself, it can often be a challenging endeavor to remember all of our passwords, and the challenge of securing our passwords becomes even more trivial when we want to avoid reusing the same passwords for many of our different accounts. There are a few ways to go about tackling this challenge if you are not someone with top-notch memorization skills. You could write the passwords down on a piece of paper, or you can use what is called password vaults. A password vault is essentially a utility that is either hosted locally on your device or is connected to the wider internet. It allows you to securely store your passwords on it. You can then lock it with a master password. While password vaults can be invaluable tools to keep a list of passwords for your various accounts there also comes risks with using…

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