Linux Network Security - Page 16

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'Mafiaboy': Cloud Computing Will Cause Internet Security Meltdown

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Reformed black-hat hacker Michael Calce, better known as the 15-year-old "mafiaboy" who, in 2000, took down Websites CNN, Yahoo, E*Trade, Dell, Amazon, and eBay, says widespread adoption of cloud computing is going to make the Internet only more of a hacker haven. "It will be the fall of the Internet as we know it," Calce said today during a Lumension Security-sponsored Webcast event. "You're basically putting everything in one little sandbox...it's going to be a lot more easy to access," he added, noting that cloud computing will be "extremely dangerous."

Anthony Pell
Jul 02, 2009

Kaminsky interview: DNSSEC addresses cross-organizational trust and security

Network security researcher Dan Kaminsky has had a year to reflect on the impact of the cache poisoning vulnerability he discovered in the Domain Name System (DNS). Kaminsky revealed during last year's Black Hat Briefings a technique that made it relatively easy to exploit the bug and enable an attacker to redirect website requests to malicious sites. In the time since, Kaminsky has become an advocate for improving security in DNS, and ultimately, trust on the Internet. One way to do this is with the widespread use of DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions), which essentially brings PKI to website requests. In this interview, Kaminsky talks about how the implementation of DNSSEC would enable greater security and trust on the Net and provide a platform for the development of new security products and services.

Anthony Pell
Jun 26, 2009

DNSSEC Showing More Signs Of Progress

The Domain Name System (DNS) security protocol is finally making inroads on the Internet infrastructure front, but big hurdles remain for widespread, smooth adoption. It has been more than 15 years in the making, but DNSSEC is finally gaining some traction: The .gov and .org top-level domains have begun to adopt the Domain Name Service (DNS) security protocol, and during the past few days, some commercial activity was associated with it.

Anthony Pell
Jun 23, 2009

Wireshark 1.2.0 released

Wireshark is the world's foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions. Wireshark development thrives thanks to the contributions of networking experts across the globe. It is the continuation of a project that started in 1998. Wireshark 1.2.0 has been released. This is the new stable release branch of Wireshark and many new and exciting features have been added since 1.0 was released.

Anthony Pell
Jun 17, 2009

New DOS attacks threaten wireless data networks

Forget spam, viruses, worms, malware and phishing. These threats are apparently old school when compared to a new class of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks that threaten wireless data networks. The latest wireless network threats were outlined in a talk here Thursday by Krishan Sabnani, vice president of networking research at Bell Labs, at the Cyber Infrastructure Protection Conference at City College of New York.

Dave Wreski
Jun 10, 2009

Clickjacking: Hijacking clicks on the Internet

Read on for info on this new security vulnerability, and learn exactly how it works. Lots of people seem to have an opinion on this article at CNET. Do you see this vulnerability as being a big problem for you? "Most exploits (like worms and attacks that take advantage of holes in software) can be patched, but clickjacking is a design flaw in the way the Web is supposed to work," Grossman said. "The bad guy is superimposing an invisible button over something the user wants to click on...It can be any button on any Web page on any Web site." The technique was used in a series of prank attacks launched on Twitter in February. In that case, users clicked on links next to tweets that said "Don't Click" and then clicked on a button that said "Don't Click" on a separate Web page. That second click distributed the original tweet to all of the Twitter user's followers, thus propagating itself rather quickly.

Anthony Pell
May 25, 2009

Hardened OS Vendor Builds Secure Virtual Layer For Network Devices

Nice article from a press release at Interop. What kind of virtualization security does Linux have, and how does it compare? What steps do people take to secure their virtual servers?Ultrasecure operating system maker Green Hills Software is quietly providing some major network equipment manufacturers with an extra layer of security for its devices. Green Hills, which last fall released a commercial version of its hardened Integrity-178B operating system used in military fighter planes, is now leveraging that technology for the network, as well. Company officials here revealed they have built a secure virtualization platform for networking equipment based on a combination of the company's secure OS virtualization and networking technologies.

Anthony Pell
May 22, 2009

Press Release: ISC Starts Development Work on BIND 10

Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), with the support of industry leading sponsors, today reveals plans for BIND 10, the next leap forward in DNS server software. BIND 10 is being designed to serve the needs of today

Dave Wreski
Apr 22, 2009

MD5 - The Internet has a Major Problem

Firstly, allow me to recap. A couple of days ago, I reported a presentation at the Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin which outlined a major problem with the way Certificate Authorities handle message hashing, essentially this attack relied on well-known problems with the MD5 hash algorithm. Problems based on hash collisions, which were previously considered to be theoretical having been discovered in 2004, were now well-lodged within the domain of reality. Have you heard about the news about the reported problem with how Certificate Authorities are handling message hashing? Read on for more information on some security issues with the current Certificate Authorities.

Bill Keys
Jan 05, 2009

Helping Protect Cookies With HTTPOnly Flag

The bottom line is this - while this cookie option flag does absolutely nothing to prevent XSS attacks, it does significanly help to prevent the #1 XSS attack goal which is stealing SessionIDs. While HTTPOnly is not a "silver bullet" by any means, the potential ROI of implement it is quite large. Notice I said "potential" as in order to provide the intended protections, two key players have to work together. This article looks at one way you can make your Web cookies more secure by using the Apache's extension called modsecurity. If you are interested in this please read on for more information and how you set this up on your own Apache web server.

Bill Keys
Dec 29, 2008

Firefox Issues Eight Patches for Web Browser

Mozilla has issued eight patches for its Firefox Web browser, three of which fix problems classified as critical.The patches come after security experts have recommended using a browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and older versions of IE due to a dangerous vulnerability. Microsoft is due to release an emergency patch for that problem Wednesday. Have you upgraded your Firefox install to the latest version yet? This article looks at the security issues that are handled by theses patches. Also this is the last release of updates to Firefox 2.0.

Bill Keys
Dec 18, 2008

Metasploit Decloaking Engine

This tool demonstrates a system for identifying the real IP address of a web user, regardless of proxy settings, using a combination of client-side technologies and custom services. No vulnerabilities are exploited by this tool. A properly configured Tor setup should not result in any identifying information being exposed. Have you used Metasploit for your penetration testing? This article looks at the Decloaking Engine. If you want to learn more about this extension to Metasploit read on...

Bill Keys
Dec 17, 2008

Linux and UNIX How To: Scripting SSH and SFTP

SSH is an indispensable tool that I use every day for file transfers, remote execution of tasks, setting up network port redirection between systems (tunneling), and securely driving a shell on a remote system. While the SSH commandline client on UNIX and Linux systems is how I interact most often with SSH servers on the remote end, there are times when it is helpful to script some action or series of actions rather than performing them interactively. This is where Python and paramiko come in. paramiko is a library for Python that provides a programmatic interface to SSH. This combination of Python and SSH allows you to drive SSH tasks you would normally perform manually. Do you use SSH or SFTP to make secure connections to your remote hosts? Do you want to automate this process? This article shows you a handy programming library call paramiko to help developing scripts that uses SSH or SFTP.

Bill Keys
Dec 11, 2008

Keeping an Eye On Your Network with PasTmon

The PasTmon passive traffic monitor keeps an eye on your network, recording which clients are interacting with which services, when and how long things took. You can then use the application's PHP Web interface to investigate these figures to see if any host is connecting to Web services that it shouldn't, or is contacting services suspiciously more frequently than you would expect for normal operation, or when response times become excessively long. Knowing what traffic is going on your network is an important security practice. This article looks at the traffic monitoring software called PasTmon. Do you have any favorite security tools that you use on your network?

Bill Keys
Dec 04, 2008

Set Up a SSH-Based Point to Point Connection

OpenSSH version 4.3 introduced a new feature: the ability to create on-the-fly "Virtual Private Networks" via the tunnel driver (the so-called "tun" driver). This allows you to create a network interface that bridges two physically disparate network segments in different locations. This article explains how to use SSH to set up SSH-based point to point connections with OpenSuse 11.0 which can then be used to create routes that create virtual private networks. This article will show you how to set up an on-the-fly Virtual Private Network with the tunnel driver. If you are interesting in setting up your own or want to learn more please read on...

Bill Keys
Dec 02, 2008

10 Mistakes New Linux Administrators Make

For many, migrating to Linux is a rite of passage that equates to a thing of joy. For others, it

Brittany Day
Dec 01, 2008

OpenSSH Speed Tips and Tricks

Although using public key authentication instead of passwords is a great method for increasing the security of SSH transfers, transferring SSH identity keys can be a royal pain. First, you create your key pairs; then, you copy the public key into the correct locations on all the machines you want to log into. The keys must be in a particular format, and you must go into the correct directory with the correct permissions. Fortunately, ssh-copy-id, a slick utility included with OpenSSH, makes it easy. This article looks a ways to make using OpenSSH more efficient. Do you have any tips, for using ssh?

Bill Keys
Nov 24, 2008

Implementing VoIPER: VoIP Exploit Research Toolkit

With VoIP devices finding their way into the majority of major enterprises and a significant number of residential installations, the possible consequences of a security vulnerability that can be leveraged by malicious hackers are ever increasing

Bill Keys
Nov 24, 2008

Zeroshell Delivers Big Network Services in a Small Package

Hand-rolling your own Linux-based network servers, routers and wireless access points is easier than ever largely because of the proliferation of tiny, specialized Linux distributions like Zeroshell. Zeroshell weighs in at just over 100 megabytes, making it perfect for embedded devices like PC Engines WRAP boards, Soekris boards, Mini-ITX, and other small form-factor computers Check out this lightweight Linux distro which is suited to delivering network security services running on embedded devices.

Brittany Day
Nov 19, 2008

Analyzing Malicious SSH Login Attempts

Malicious SSH login attempts have been appearing in some administrators' logs for several years. This article revisits the use of honeypots to analyze malicious SSH login attempts and see what can be learned about this activity. The article then offers recommendations on how to secure one's system against these attacks. Have you ever looked at your ssh logs and notice attackers trying to get in? This article analyses those logs and presents some recommendations to show you how to make your ssh server more secure.

Bill Keys
Nov 18, 2008

Linux Network Security - Page 16

Harnessing Proxies for Enhanced Threat Intelligence: A Guide with Open Source Tools

Understanding HTTP Proxy Servers: A Vital Linux Network Security Tool

Exploring Vulnerability Scanners: Tools & Strategies for a Secure Network