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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Krebs Goes Down, Opera Gets a VPN & More…

    Krebs on Security in record DDOS attack: Everybody’s go-to site for news and views of security issues, has been temporarily knocked offline in a DDOS attack for the record books. We first heard about the attack on Thursday morning after Brian Krebs reported that his site was being hit by as much as 620 Gbs, more than double the previous record which was considered to be a mind-blower back in 2013 when the anti-spam site Spamhaus was brought to its knees.

    Security sites such as Krebs’ that perform investigative research into security issues are often targets of the bad guys. In this latest case, Ars Technica reported the attack came after Krebs published the identity of people connected with vDOS, Israeli black hats who launched DDOS attacks for pay and took in $600,000 in two years doing so. Akamai had been donating DDoS mitigation services to Krebs, but by 4 p.m. on the day the attack began they withdrew the service, motivated by the high cost of defending against such a massive attack. At this point, Krebs decided to shut down his site.

  • Upgrade your SSH keys!

    When generating the keypair, you're asked for a passphrase to encrypt the private key with. If you will ever lose your private key it should protect others from impersonating you because it will be encrypted with the passphrase. To actually prevent this, one should make sure to prevent easy brute-forcing of the passphrase.

    OpenSSH key generator offers two options to resistance to brute-force password cracking: using the new OpenSSH key format and increasing the amount of key derivation function rounds. It slows down the process of unlocking the key, but this is what prevents efficient brute-forcing by a malicious user too. I'd say experiment with the amount of rounds on your system. Start at about 100 rounds. On my system it takes about one second to decrypt and load the key once per day using an agent. Very much acceptable, imo.

  • Irssi 0.8.20 Released
  • What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

    Today we’d like to explain what it costs to run Let’s Encrypt. We’re doing this because we strive to be a transparent organization, we want people to have some context for their contributions to the project, and because it’s interesting.

    Let’s Encrypt will require about $2.9M USD to operate in 2017. We believe this is an incredible value for a secure and reliable service that is capable of issuing certificates globally, to every server on the Web free of charge.

    We’re currently working to raise the money we need to operate through the next year. Please consider donating or becoming a sponsor if you’re able to do so! In the event that we end up being able to raise more money than we need to just keep Let’s Encrypt running we can look into adding other services to improve access to a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.

  • North Korean DNS Leak reveals North Korean websites

    One of North Korea’s top level DNS servers was mis-configured today (20th September 2016) accidentally allowing global DNS zone transfers. This allowed anyone who makes a zone transfer request (AXFR) to retrieve a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data.

    [...]

    This data showed there are 28 domains configured inside North Korea, here is the list:

    airkoryo.com.kp
    cooks.org.kp
    friend.com.kp
    gnu.rep.kp
    kass.org.kp
    kcna.kp
    kiyctc.com.kp
    knic.com.kp
    koredufund.org.kp
    korelcfund.org.kp
    korfilm.com.kp
    ma.gov.kp
    masikryong.com.kp
    naenara.com.kp
    nta.gov.kp
    portal.net.kp
    rcc.net.kp
    rep.kp
    rodong.rep.kp
    ryongnamsan.edu.kp
    sdprk.org.kp
    silibank.net.kp
    star-co.net.kp
    star-di.net.kp
    star.co.kp
    star.edu.kp
    star.net.kp
    vok.rep.kp

  • Yahoo’s Three Hacks

    As a number of outlets have reported, Yahoo has announced that 500 million of its users’ accounts got hacked in 2014 by a suspected state actor.

    But that massive hack is actually one of three interesting hacks of Yahoo in recent years.

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.