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Security: Updates, FBI, Windows Cameras and More

Filed under
Security
  • Security updates for Wednesday
  • The FBI wants you to do this one thing to your home router, now
  • FBI wants you to reboot your router: What you need to know
  • Did You Restart Your Router Like the FBI Asked?
  • The FBI is warning you to reboot your router to prevent a new attack — here's everything you need to do
  • Mainstream Media Warns of 'Russian Malware', Ignores CIA's Own Virus Development

    The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned hackers may have compromised hundreds of thousands of routers and other home network devices the world over with malware. Perhaps predictably, the Russians are said to be behind the ploy - but past experience suggests the true source may lie closer to home.

    In an official statement, the FBI said the virus — ‘VPNFilter' — was being used to launch attacks on infrastructure and render electronic devices useless. Anyone possessing a router is strongly urged by the Bureau to reset their device — the malware works in three stages, and rebooting the router prevents the implementation of the latter two stages.

    "Owners are advised to consider disabling remote management settings on devices and secure with strong passwords and encryption when enabled. Network devices should be upgraded to the latest available versions of firmware," the Bureau suggested.

  • Securing the container image supply chain

    "Security is hard" is a tautology, especially in the fast-moving world of container orchestration. We have previously covered various aspects of Linux container security through, for example, the Clear Containers implementation or the broader question of Kubernetes and security, but those are mostly concerned with container isolation; they do not address the question of trusting a container's contents. What is a container running? Who built it and when? Even assuming we have good programmers and solid isolation layers, propagating that good code around a Kubernetes cluster and making strong assertions on the integrity of that supply chain is far from trivial. The 2018 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event featured some projects that could eventually solve that problem. 

    [...]

    The question of container trust hardly seems resolved at all; the available solutions are complex and would be difficult to deploy for Kubernetes rookies like me. However, it seems that Kubernetes could make small improvements to improve security and auditability, the first of which is probably setting the image pull policy to a more reasonable default. In his talk, Mouat also said it should be easier to make Kubernetes fetch images only from a trusted registry instead of allowing any arbitrary registry by default.

    Beyond that, cluster operators wishing to have better control over their deployments should start looking into setting up Notary with an admission controller, maybe Portieris if they can figure out how to make it play with their own Notary servers. Considering the apparent complexity of Grafeas and in-toto, I would assume that those would probably be reserved only to larger "enterprise" deployments but who knows; Kubernetes may be complex enough as it is that people won't mind adding a service or two in there to improve its security. Keep in mind that complexity is an enemy of security, so operators should be careful when deploying solutions unless they have a good grasp of the trade-offs involved.

  • Victorian speed cameras hit by computer virus

    Independent report into WannaCry virus

    An unsuspecting contractor was blamed for introducing the virus into Victoria’s speed camera network sometime in early June 2017. The malware was first detected on 6 June 2017 when 20 cameras crashed along the Hume Highway and remained offline overnight.

    The infected cameras ran on Windows 7. Another company who used Unix-based cameras still suffered thanks to Windows operating system powered site control units. It wasn’t until 14 June that the true cause of the outages was found and over the next two days, engineers worked on a patch to secure the system. Finally, by 22 June, cameras were fully operational and virus-free again.

  • Secret Commands Let Google Access All Your Android Text Messages

    Google is known for hiding easter eggs, and secret features buried deep in its Android OS. However, a weird glitch has appeared on Android which honestly seems more like a bug than an easter egg.

    The glitch shows your text messages in search results by using the Google cards assistant feature. It was reported in a Reddit post which says that typing “the1975..com” into the Google search bar will display all your text messages on the screen.

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.