Ultimate Guide To Secure Linux OS Laptop For Free

Creating an SSH honeypot

Many developers use SSH to access their systems, so it is not surprising that SSH servers are widely attacked. During the FOSDEM 2021 conference, Sanja Bonic and Janos Pasztor reported on their experiment using containers as a way to easily create SSH honeypots — fake servers that allow administrators to observe the actions of attackers without risking a production system. The conversational-style talk walked the audience through the process of setting up an SSH server to play the role of the honeypot, showed what SSH attacks look like, and gave a number of suggestions on how to improve the security of SSH servers.

A honeypot is a network-accessible server, typically more weakly protected than ordinary servers. System administrators deploy honeypots to attract attackers and record their actions, which allows the administrators to analyze those actions and improve the defenses of their production systems based on the information gained. Honeypots may reveal new ways for attackers to get in or confirm the most common ones. They exist in different flavors for different types of servers; Bonic and Pasztor concentrated on honeypots providing a publicly accessible SSH server. A number of elements are needed to build such honeypot: the SSH server itself, an environment the attackers will be allowed into (that is able to contain any damage), and a logging (audit) system that will record all of the information on the attacker's actions.

They started with the logging system, which has uses beyond honeypots. In large companies, audit trails are often recorded "in case some super-secret company stuff leaks". The solution Bonic and Pasztor chose for their honeypot was asciinema, a tool for recording and replaying console sessions. The asciinema log consists of JSON fragments, making it easy to parse. It starts with a header (with information like the format version and the terminal size); all subsequent lines are arrays with three items: a timestamp, the mode (input or output), and the content. Interested readers can see what can be done with the tool on the asciinema examples page. Bonic and Pasztor's original idea was to be provide a video-like replay of attacker's sessions.

The second element of the configuration is the SSH server. Pasztor explained that there are multiple projects working on fake SSH servers; they simulate an environment and give simulated results. The problem, from the point of view of a honeypot builder, is that the tool has to simulate a shell and a honeypot needs a directory structure (and content in its files, presumably). Providing all of the necessary files leads to something similar to assembling a virtual machine, Pasztor said, and that not an easy thing to do. He added that honeypots try to prevent the attacker from actually running programs on a machine, as that may cause security problems. If the reason to run the honeypot is just to see what commands the attacker is issuing, a fake server is enough. However, for an in-depth analysis, more will be needed.

S3 Ep25: Drained accounts, ransomware attacks and Linux badware [Podcast] [Ed: Curiously enough, as is abundantly the case/typical, they don't mention Windows when it comes to ransomware but are happy to insert the word "Linux" in a bad connotation to perpetuate a misleading stigma (you really need to install malicious software on it]

Linux Core Scheduling Nears The Finish Line To Avoid Flipping Off HT - Phoronix

Besides Linux kernel developers still working to optimize code due to Retpolines overhead three years after Spectre rocked the ecosystem, another area kernel developers have still been actively working on is core scheduling for controlling the behavior of what software can share CPU resources or run on the sibling thread of a CPU core. That core scheduling work is finally closer to the mainline Linux kernel.

Core scheduling has been an area of much interest by different companies -- especially public cloud providers -- due to the growing number of side-channel vulnerabilities affecting Intel Hyper Threading and some security recommendations to disable this form of SMT. With core scheduling, there is control for ensuring trusted and untrusted tasks don't share a CPU core / sibling thread and thereby help reduce the security implications of keeping Intel Hyper Threading enabled.

Plausible: Privacy-Focused Google Analytics Alternative

Plausible is a simple, privacy-friendly analytics tool. It helps you analyze the number of unique visitors, pageviews, bounce rate and visit duration.

If you have a website you would probably understand those terms. As a website owner, it helps you know if your site is getting more visitors over the time, from where the traffic is coming and if you have some knowledge on these things, you can work on improving your website for more visits.

When it comes to website analytics, the one service that rules this domain is the Google’s free tool Google Analytics. Just like Google is the de-facto search engine, Google Analytics is the de-facto analytics tool. But you don’t have to live with it specially if you cannot trust Big tech with your and your site visitor’s data.

Plausible gives you the freedom from Google Analytics and I am going to discuss this open source project in this article.

Please mind that some technical terms in the article could be unknown to you if you have never managed a website or bothered about analytics.

Coveware censors post after ransomware actors use it for promotion

Incident response firm Coveware has deleted a small portion of an article it had posted online in 2019, after the actors behind the REvil ransomware group — also known as Sodinokibi — used it to promote the efficiency of their own decryptor over that of the one used by rival ransomware actor, Ryuk.

The mess at Medium

The episode captured Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment.

On Tuesday, it also cost dozens of journalists their jobs. In a blog post, billionaire Medium founder Ev Williams announced the latest pivot for the nearly nine-year old company. Just over two years into an effort to create a subscription-based bundle of publications committed to high-quality original journalism — and in the immediate aftermath of a bruising labor battle that had seen its workers fall one vote short of forming a union — Williams offered buyouts to all of its roughly 75 editorial employees.

Text authentication is even worse than almost anyone thought

From an IT security perspective, this story gets far more frightening as it delves into how messed up the entire telecom universe is when it comes to protecting text communications. That is yet another reason why texting can't be trusted for authentication or, for that matter, for almost anything.

Speculating the entire x86-64 Instruction Set In Seconds with This One Weird Trick

As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark Ermolov’s tweet about the undocumented instruction reading from/writing to the CRBUS, I had a bit of free time in my hands and I knew I had to find out the opcode so I started theory-crafting right away. After a few hours of staring at numbers, I ended up coming up with a method of discovering practically every instruction in the processor using a side(?)-channel. It’s an interesting method involving even more interesting components of the processor so I figured I might as well write about it, so here it goes.