Pages with tag Security

A Technologists Deep Dive into indictment detailing Russia's Hacking of the 2016 USA elections Since the 2016 USA elections evidence is piling up that Russia's Intelligence services attacked the election process with an attempt to derail Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Evidence is piling up in other countries about similar cybersecurity attacks by Russia against other elections. On Friday, the special prosecutors office investigating the USA election hacking (Robert Meuller's team) released an indictment laying out the Russian Intelligence service officers involved, and more importantly the technology and techniques being used. In part this story is about misapplying technology in order to create more chaos and confusion in the world.

Block remote root login via ssh on Ubuntu/etc to keep your server safe A moment ago I was checking the system logs on my Ubuntu server and found that in auth.log reports that someone was repeatedly trying to SSH login as root. The "root" entry in /etc/passwd is setup so that no password will ever be matched, so perhaps this potential cracker would never get into my server anyway. But the requests are using bandwidth - and what if they were able to figure out a password that would work? Why not just block remote SSH login access to logging in as root in the first place? It's a bad idea to login directly as root - instead the recommended best practice is to login as a regular user then use sudo to perform things requiring super user access.

Brickerbot, vigilante software aiming to kill malicious botnets by killing IoT devices The last few months has seen escalating botnet activity on the Internet. The botnet operators are targeting non-existent security in certain Internet of Things devices. Some devices, like wireless security cameras or baby monitors, are not only connected to the Internet, but have gaping security holes. Using those holes, botnet operators have ammassed vast flotillas of Internet devices that can be commanded to attack targets on the Internet. Last fall several attacks, larger than any previously seen, attacked several large sites and even brought down critical Internet infrastructure on a few instances. The Brickerbot appears to be a Botnet purposed with destroying those malicious botnets. One hopes the cure is better than the illness.

Build a security camera system with Raspberry Pi Zero and cheap webcams Implement a full security camera system supporting multiple cameras, with night vision, motion detection, uploading video to Google Drive, all built on the Raspberry Pi Zero platform. The Zero W makes a perfect security camera because of its small size, and the NO-IR camera supports night vision (with IR light source) in a slim case that directly supports the camera.

Example phishing attempt - bogus try at grabbing $10,000 in BTC In the interest of exposing scammers let me share a phishing attempt I just recieved. The email includes a lot of technological-sounding phrases that are a threat to reveal compromising information. The supposed kompromat would be deleted if one sent some BTC to a named address, otherwise it'll be shared to all my friends.

Fixing 'Enter passphrase for /dev/fd/63' in a Gitlab CI job If you're a Gitlab user you're probably hoping to use Gitlab CI to automate builds and deployments. You probably want to deploy something using rsync, using an SSH key for security. Unfortunately (in my opinion) the official Gitlab documentation is confusing. While the Gitlab team does provide example .gitlab-ci.yml files that are supposed to work, the actual specifics of what to do are sketchy, and I found myself puzzling over a curious error message: "Enter passphrase for /dev/fd/63" ... WTF?

Guccifer 2.0 and fake Romania connections to Russia hacking 2016 USA elections Last Friday (July 13, 2018), the Meuller team issued an indictment of a handfull of Russian GRU agents who are claimed to have hacked the DNC and DCCC servers, then distributed stolen information in an attempt to discredit the Hillary Clinton campaign. Or maybe the goal was to have Donald Trump elected President, which did happen. In any case a big figure in the story is Guccifer 2.0, who purported to be a Romanian hacker, but the Meuller team claims was actually Russian agents. This seems like an interesting angle to explore a bit.

Node Cookbook is great for deeper understanding of Node.js programming

Node Web Development 2nd edition has been released!!