Security: Yubico, Microsoft Loving Ransomware and 'Home' 'Security'

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Using a YubiKey as a second factor for LUKS
The Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) is a platform-independent specification for hard disk encryption. In this tutorial, we use the challenge-response feature of a YubiKey to add two-factor authentication (2FA) to an existing LUKS-protected device.
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Yubico Security Key vs. Nitrokey FIDO2
WebAuthn, Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials Level 1, is a W3C Recommendation released in March 2019. It defines creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications. It is very similar to the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, but extended and customized for online services.
Security devices with WebAuthn support allow you to use two-factor authentication more easily since they contain a secret key that provides a second factor only by pressing the device's button. They can also be used as a single factor in some cases, storing your credentials for you.
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Windows ransomware is a nice little earner for Microsoft
One reason why Microsoft stays silent about ransomware attacks on its Windows operating system is because the company makes money when it is called in to help tackle such attacks which are increasing all the time.
The Norwegian firm Norsk Hydro, which was hit by the LockerGoga ransomware in March last year, has been the biggest company to suffer from this scourge in recent times and has been affected to the tune of about US$75 million.
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Wifi deauthentication attacks and home security
I live in a large apartment complex (it's literally a city block big), so I spend a disproportionate amount of time walking down corridors. Recently one of my neighbours installed a Ring wireless doorbell. By default these are motion activated (and the process for disabling motion detection is far from obvious), and if the owner subscribes to an appropriate plan these recordings are stored in the cloud. I'm not super enthusiastic about the idea of having my conversations recorded while I'm walking past someone's door, so I decided to look into the security of these devices.
One visit to Amazon later and I had a refurbished Ring Video Doorbell 2™ sitting on my desk. Tearing it down revealed it uses a TI SoC that's optimised for this sort of application, linked to a DSP that presumably does stuff like motion detection. The device spends most of its time in a sleep state where it generates no network activity, so on any wakeup it has to reassociate with the wireless network and start streaming data.
So we have a device that's silent and undetectable until it starts recording you, which isn't a great place to start from. But fortunately wifi has a few, uh, interesting design choices that mean we can still do something. The first is that even on an encrypted network, the packet headers are unencrypted and contain the address of the access point and whichever device is communicating. This means that it's possible to just dump whatever traffic is floating past and build up a collection of device addresses. Address ranges are allocated by the IEEE, so it's possible to map the addresses you see to manufacturers and get some idea of what's actually on the network[1] even if you can't see what they're actually transmitting. The second is that various management frames aren't encrypted, and so can be faked even if you don't have the network credentials.
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digiKam 7.7.0 is released
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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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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.
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