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Security: Proprietary Software Holes and More

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Security
  • It's the end of the 20-teens, and your Windows PC can still be pwned by nothing more than a simple bad font

    With the year winding to a close and the holiday parties set to kick off, admins will want to check out the December Patch Tuesday load from Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, and SAP and get them installed before downing the first of many egg nogs.

    [...]

    Also of note is CVE-2019-1471, a critical hypervisor escape bug that would allow an attacker running on a guest VM to execute code on the host box.

    The bulk of this month's critical fixes were for a series of five remote code execution flaws in Git for Visual Studio. In each of the flaws, said to be caused by improper handling of command-line input, an attacker would launch the exploit by convincing the target to clone a malicious repo.

    The remaining critical patch is for CVE-2019-1468, a play on the tried-and-true font-parsing vulnerability. In the wild, an attacker would embed the poisoned font file in a webpage and attack any system that visits.

  • Exploring Legacy Unix Security Issues

    The operating system SGI IRIX 6.5.22 was declared end of life in 2003, so it has limited use as a production system. I decided I could relive the good old days by looking for new vulnerabilities on an old system in my spare time. It was also an excuse to write some C code, and refresh my memory.

    One of my favorite vulnerabilities is the Insecure Temporary File (CWE-377). This involves manipulating files created in /tmp in an insecure manner. A file is created in /tmp by a piece of software that doesn’t check if the file exists before creating it. Allowing a malicious local user to symlink that file to a critical system file and overwriting it with the contents of what is written to the file in /tmp.

    So I started looking under the /usr/sbin directory for binaries to target. I did a quick examination of binaries and scripts in using the find command to give myself a starting point.

  • Private Internet Access updates Linux desktop client to prevent against [CVE-2019-14899]

    The Breakpointing Bad team at the University of New Mexico recently reported a VPN vulnerability that affects Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, and more. The vulnerability allows malicious actors to not only see your VPN IP address, but also identify sites you are visiting and inject data into connections. The team consists of William J. Tolley, Beau Kujath, and Jedidiah R. Crandall and the public was notified on December 4th, 2019. Designated [CVE-2019-14899], the vulnerability shook the VPN industry due to the breadth of affected systems. [CVE-2019-14899] affects many different types of VPN protocols including OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2/IPSec.

    Private Internet Access has released an update to its Linux client that mitigates [CVE-2019-14899] from being used to infer any information about our users’ VPN connections. To our knowledge, Private Internet Access is the first commercial VPN to release a new client that prevents this ongoing security vulnerability.

  • Chrome now warns you when your password has been stolen

    Google is rolling out Chrome version 79 today, and it includes a number of password protection improvements. The biggest addition is that Chrome will now warn you when your password has been stolen as part of a data breach. Google has been warning about reused passwords in a separate browser extension or in its password checkup tool, but the company is now baking this directly into Chrome to provide warnings as you log in to sites on the web.

Google Chrome Will Now Alert You...

  • Google Chrome Will Now Alert You If Your Passwords Have Been Hacked

    Google yesterday rolled a new stable version of the company’s web browser, Chrome 79 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The new web browser comes with several security improvements and better secure browsing protections.

    The biggest highlight of this browser is that Chrome will now automatically warn you if your password has been compromised in a data breach. The new feature was also tweeted by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

    With the latest release of Chrome, anyone whose login credentials has been leaked in a data breach previously will get a notification when logging into a site.

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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.