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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Chris Lamb: Free software activities in July 2021

    One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

    [...]

    As part of my role of being the assistant Secretary of the Open Source Initiative and a board director of Software in the Public Interest I attended their respective monthly meetings. As outlined in last months posts, however, my term on the OSI board has been slightly extended due to the discovery of a vulnerability in OSI's recent election — as a result, the 2021 election is currently being re-run.

  • Aaron Portnoy – ‘There’s no silver bullet for ransomware or supply chain attacks’ [Ed: When you receive packages from Microsoft/GitHub/NPM you're basically begging for malware. Not just PRISM; Microsoft literally brings people from the NSA to run GitHub/NPM.]
  • This Week In Security: Fail2RCE, TPM Sniffing, Fishy Leaks, And Decompiling | Hackaday

    Fail2ban is a great tool for dynamically blocking IP addresses that show bad behavior, like making repeated login attempts. It was just announced that a vulnerability could allow an attacker to take over a machine by being blocked by Fail2ban. The problem is in the mail-whois action, where an email is sent to the administrator containing the whois information. Whois information is potentially attacker controlled data, and Fail2ban doesn’t properly sterilize the input before piping it into the mail binary. Mailutils has a feature that uses the tilde key as an escape sequence, allowing commands to be run while composing a message. Fail2ban doesn’t sanitize those tilde commands, so malicious whois data can trivially run commands on the system. Whois is one of the old-school unix protocols that runs in the clear, so a MItM attack makes this particularly easy. If you use Fail2ban, make sure to update to 0.10.7 or 0.11.3, or purge any use of mail-whois from your active configs.

  • Ransomware Changes: DoppelPaymer Rebrands; Babuk Evolves

    One example is the DoppelPaymer - aka DopplePaymer - ransomware-as-a-service operation, which has gone relatively quiet since early May, posting no victims to its data leak site since May 6 and no leaked files since June 25. But one expert says the operation appears to have been rebranded by its operator, Evil Corp, in an attempt to avoid sanctions imposed on the crime group in December 2019 by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

    The Babuk ransomware operation also recently appears to have altered its approach - if not splintered - following its late-April ransomware attack against the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C.

  • The Week in Ransomware - July 30th 2021 - €1 billion saved

    We also saw ransomware groups continue to innovate with LockBit 2.0 now using group policies to automate the deployment of their ransomware over a Windows domain.

    I shared what I know about the inner conflict of the Babuk ransomware gang...

  • Secure applications with Keycloak authentication tool [Ed: Is this journalism or "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.