Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Security: FUD, Patches, and Misconfigured Servers

Filed under
Security
  • Hackers exploit old flaw to turn Linux servers into cryptocurrency miners [Ed: Neglect it relies on means GNU/Linux is not at all the issue here]
  • Security updates for Thursday
  • Security updates for Friday
  • Dealing with network hackers in 1995

    Going back to early 1995, I was working for Los Alamos National Labs as a contractor systems administrator. I didn't have a security clearance so could not work 'behind the fence' as they said. Instead, I worked with a large number of similarly uncleared post-docs, graduate students, and college interns in a strip mall converted into offices. The offices ran from nearly one end of the strip mall to the other with a large selection of Unix, PC, and Mac systems spread through the building connected together with 10base2 (or thin-wire). To make things even more fun, most of the systems were disk-less SunOS Sparc ELC/SLC and IPC systems booting off a Sparc 10 which had 64 MB of RAM and I think 2 2 GB disk drives.

    The first problem I had to deal with was my most of the systems would crash at different times during the day. I got a Digital network book my Dad had given me, and learned about common problems with networking as this was not something I had dealt with before. I found that the local network was connected to a T1 which ran back to the main campus about 2 miles away. The T1 went to a hub which had 7 thin-wire lines running out of it. That seemed fine until I traced the thin-wire out. I was worried there were bad connectors (there were) or kinks in the line (there were) but the real problem was that out of the 7 thin-wire lines 3 were used.  Most of the systems were on one line. 2 (my desktop and the Sparc 10) were on another one, and the Next and SGI's were on the third. The other lines were just laying under the carpets not used. I met with my new boss Dale, and showed him what I had found. I learned a lot from Dale. He got me a copy of the Unix System Administrators Handbook and told me to start reading it on networks.

  • How “Hacker Search Engine” Shodan Caught Leakage of 750MB Worth Of Server Passwords

    Remember Memcached servers? Now, we have another case of servers exposed online and fulfilling evil intentions of the hackers. This time, thousands of etcd servers maintained by corporates and organizations are spitting sensitive passwords and encrypted keys, allowing anyone to get access to important data.

    Security researcher Giovanni Collazo was able to harvest 8781 passwords, 650 AWS access keys, 23 secret keys, and 8 private keys.

  • The security footgun in etcd

    From an application security perspective databases are the most valuable parts of our systems. They store the data that gives value to our apps and companies. This data which has been entrusted to us by our users should be kept safe and away of the hands of criminals.

  • Thousands of servers found leaking 750MB worth of passwords and keys

    Thousands of servers operated by businesses and other organizations are openly sharing credentials that may allow anyone on the Internet to log in and read or modify potentially sensitive data stored online.

    In a blog post published late last week, researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications. etcd comes with a programming interface that responds to simple queries that by default return administrative login credentials without first requiring authentication. The passwords, encryption keys, and other forms of credentials are used to access MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, content management systems, and other types of production servers.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.