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Security: Updates, Equifax, Black Duck FUD, Emacs 25.3, and Measuring Security

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Security
  • Security updates for Monday
  • Researchers use Windows 10 Linux subsystem to run malware

    The provision of a Linux subsystem on Windows systems — a new Windows 10 feature known as Subsystem for Linux (WSL) — has made it possible to run known malware on such systems and bypass even the most common security solutions, security researchers at Check Point claim.

    In a detailed blog post, researchers Gal Elbaz and Dvir Atias said they had dubbed this technique of getting malware onto a Windows system as Bashware, with Bash being the default shell on a large number of Linux distributions.

  • Episode 62 - All about the Equifax hack
  • Equifax moves to fix weak PINs for “security freeze” on consumer credit reports

    As Equifax moved to provide consumers the ability to protect their credit reports on the heels of a major data breach, some of the details of the company's response were found lacking. As consumers registered and moved to lock their credit reports—in order to prevent anyone who had stolen data from opening credit in their name—they found that the security personal identification number (PIN) provided in the locking process was potentially insecure.

    [...]

    The PIN revelation came on the heels of concerns that Equifax was attempting to block the ability of those checking to see if their data was exposed or enrolling in the TrustedID Premiere service to sue Equifax over the breach. An Equifax spokesperson said that the arbitration clause in the Terms of Service for TrustedID Premier only applied to the service itself, not to the breach.

  • Unpatched Open Source Software Flaw Blamed for Massive Equifax Breach [Ed: But this claim has since then been retracted, so it might be fake news]
  • Equifax Breach Blamed on Open-Source Software Flaw [Ed: This report from a News Corp. tabloid has since been retracted, so why carry on linking to it?]
  • The hidden threat lurking in an otherwise secure software stack [Ed: Yet another attack on FOSS security, courtesy of the Microsoft-connected Black Duck]
  • [ANNOUNCE] Emacs 25.3 released
  • Emacs 25.3 Released To Fix A Security Vulnerability Of Malicious Lisp Scripts

    GNU --
    Emacs 25.3 is now available, but it doesn't offer major new features, rather it fixes a security vulnerability.

    Emacs' x-display decoding feature within the Enriched Text mode could lead to executing arbitrary malicious Lisp code within the text.

  • Measuring security: Part 1 - Things that make money

    If you read my previous post on measuring security, you know I broke measuring into three categories. I have no good reason to do this other than it's something that made sense to me. There are without question better ways to split these apart, I'm sure there is even overlap, but that's not important. What actually matters is to start a discussion on measuring what we do. The first topic is about measuring security that directly adds to revenue such as a product or service.

    [...]

    I see a lot of groups that don't do any of this. They wander in circles sometimes adding security features that don't matter, often engineering solutions that customers only need or want 10% of. I'll never forget when I first looked at actual metrics on new features and realized something we wanted to add was going to have a massive cost and generate zero additional revenue (it may have actually detracted in future product sales). On this day I saw the power in metrics. Overnight my group became heroes for saving everyone a lot of work and headaches. Sometimes doing nothing is the most valuable action you can take.

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.