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Security: GNU/Linux Updates, Reproducible Builds, Kaspersky, and "Choosing Windows for your organization should get you fired"

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Security
  • Security updates for Wednesday
  • Security updates for Tuesday
  • Reproducible Builds: week 113 in Stretch cycle
  • Multiple vulnerabilities found in Kaspersky Lab's Anti-Virus for Linux File Server [Newsflash: PROPRIETARY software for security is itself a security menace]

    People expect their anti-virus to protect them from malware and exploits but sometimes, even these products have their own vulnerabilities. Leandro Barragan and Maximiliano Vidal, researchers at network security firm Core Security, have found a number of possible exploits in the Web Management Console for Kaspersky's Anti-virus for Linux File Servers.

  • Pentagon draft budget bans Kaspersky Lab products

    The draft budget said, in an amendment proposed by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, that it "prohibits the DOD from using software platforms developed by Kaspersky Lab due to reports that the Moscow-based company might be vulnerable to Russian government influence."

  • Choosing Windows for your organization should get you fired

    I know. That’s harsh.

    But it’s true. If you haven’t yet replaced Windows, across the board, you absolutely stink at your job.

    For years, we’ve had one trojan, worm and virus after another. And almost every single one is specifically targeting Microsoft Windows. Not MacOS. Not Linux. Not DOS. Not Unix. Windows.

    Wannacry managed to infect hundreds of thousands of highly vulnerable Windows installations around the globe. It was a huge problem for many major institutions that fill their organizations with the operating system from Redmond, Washington.

    But did you learn your lesson? No.

    Then another bit of ransomware comes along, called NotPetya, and manages to take out critical systems at freaking Chernobyl. Also airports and banks. Oh, and hospitals. Can’t forget about the hospitals.

  • Met Police still running using Windows XP on 18,000 PCs

    Indeed, it would appear that the pace of change is slowing, with Metropolitan Police using Windows XP on 35,000 PCs in April 2015, 27,000 in August 2016, and 19,000 in December last year, according to Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests.

  • Ransomware attack 'not designed to make money', researchers claim
  • Pnyetya: Yet Another Ransomware Outbreak

    The superficial resemblance to Petya is only skin deep. Although there is significant code sharing, the real Petya was a criminal enterprise for making money. This is definitely not designed to make money. This is designed to spread fast and cause damage, with a plausibly deniable cover of “ransomware.”

  • The Petya ransomware is starting to look like a cyberattack in disguise
  • ‘Petya’ Ransomware Outbreak Goes Global

    Security firm Symantec confirmed that Petya uses the “Eternal Blue” exploit, a digital weapon that was believed to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency and in April 2017 leaked online by a hacker {sic} group calling itself the Shadow Brokers.

  • Latest Ransomware Hackers Didn't Make WannaCry's Mistakes

    And while it owes its rapid spread in part to EternalBlue, the same stolen NSA exploit WannaCry leveraged, it lacks several of the traits that made WannaCry—which turned out to be an unfinished North Korean project gone awry—easier to stop.

  • A new ransomware outbreak similar to WCry is shutting down computers worldwide [Ed: Windows and NSA back doors]

    News organizations reported potentially serious disruptions around the world, with organizations throughout Ukraine being hit particularly hard. In that country, infections reportedly hit metro networks, power utility companies, government ministry sites, airports, banks, media outlets, and state-owned companies. Those affected included radiation monitors at the Chernobyl nuclear facility. A photograph published by Reuters showed an ATM at a branch of Ukraine's state-owned Oschadbank bank that was inoperable. A message displayed on the screen demanded a payment to unlock it. Meanwhile, Reuters also reported that Ukrainian state power distributor Ukrenergo said its IT systems were also hit by a cyber attack but that the disruption had no impact on power supplies or broader operations. Others hit, according to Bloomberg, included Ukrainian delivery network Nova Poshta, which halted service to clients after its network was infected. Bloomberg also said Ukraine's Central Bank warned on its website that several banks had been targeted by hackers.

  • AlertSec Aims to Make Encryption Security More Accessible

    Ebba Blitz isn't a typical technology industry CEO and the company she leads isn't a typical security vendor either. Blitz joined AlertSec after a career in journalism in Sweden where she honed her craft of making complex subjects more understandable which is what she's now doing in a different capability with security at AlertSec

    "We help small and medium sized companies get the same level of security that larger enterprises normally have, in terms of full-disk encryption and we manage it for them," Blitz said.

  • Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query
  • Global ransomware attack causes turmoil

    The Chernobyl nuclear power plant has also had to monitor radiation levels manually after its Windows-based sensors were shut down.

  • Episode 53 - A plane isn't like a car

    Josh and Kurt talk about security through obscurity, airplanes, the FAA, the Windows source code leak, and chicken sandwiches.

  • WikiLeaks Dump Reveals a Creepy CIA Location-Tracking Trick

    If you're using a Windows laptop or PC you could add another group to the list: the CIA.

  • WikiLeaks Releases Files on CIA Spying Geo-Location Malware for WiFi Devices

    The whistleblowing platform released what appears to be the CIA's user manual for the ELSA project as evidence.
    WikiLeaks began releasing Vault 7 on March 7, with the first full part comprising 8,761 documents. The previous release took place on June 22 and was dedicated to the CIA "Brutal Kangaroo” hacking tool.

  • Ohio Gov. Kasich’s website, dozens of others defaced using year-old exploit

    DNN Platform is a popular content management system (particularly with state and local governments) based on Windows Server and the ASP.NET framework for Microsoft Internet Information Server. DNN Platform is open source and available for free—making it attractive to government agencies looking for something low cost that fits into their existing Windows Server-heavy organizations. A review of the HTML source of each of the sites attacked by Team System DZ showed that they were running a vulnerable version of the content management system DNN Platform—version 7.0, which was released in 2015.

  • Linux malware gaining favor among cybercriminals [Ed: Doug Olenick, Online Editor, rewrote a press release of a company that needs to badmouth GNU/Linux (for SALES)]

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.