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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Hijacking webcams with Screencastify | Almost Secure

    Everyone has received the mails trying to extort money by claiming to have hacked a person’s webcam and recorded a video of them watching porn. These are a bluff of course, but the popular Screencastify browser extension actually provides all the infrastructure necessary for someone to pull this off. A website that a user visited could trick the extension into starting a webcam recording among other things, without any indications other than the webcam’s LED lighting up if present. The website could then steal the video from the user’s Google Drive account that it was uploaded to, along with anything else that account might hold.

    Screencastify is a browser extension that aids you in creating a video recording of your entire screen or a single window, optionally along with your webcam stream where you explain what you are doing right now. Chrome Web Store shows “10,000,000+ users” for it which is the highest number it will display – same is shown for extensions with more than 100 million users. The extension is being marketed for educational purposes and gained significant traction in the current pandemic.

    As of now, it appears that Screencastify only managed to address the Cross-site Scripting vulnerability which gave arbitrary websites access to the extension’s functionality, as opposed to “merely” Screencastify themselves and a dozen other vendors they work with. As this certainly won’t be their last Cross-site Scripting vulnerability, I sincerely recommend staying clear of this browser extension.

  • Malicious Python Repository Package Drops Cobalt Strike on Windows, macOS & Linux Systems [Ed: This is not an OS issue; it's about people installing malware on their own systems and it's not even an "Open Source" issue; led by companies that put NSA back doors in their proprietary software, there's an effort underway to say "Open Source" is the real threat and they tell us the solution to the problem is with the firms that help NSA invade machines]

    The PyPI "pymafka" package is the latest example of growing attacker interest in abusing widely used open source software repositories.

  • Why sudo is so important in Linux and how to use it | ZDNet

    When I first started using Linux, things were exponentially more complicated. The distributions were far less mature, but they also required the use of a particular system account to get certain things done. That account was root, and with it, you had unlimited power over your operating system.

    To demonstrate the power of root, one trick you could always play on unsuspecting users was to tell them to change to the root user with the command su and then have them issue the following command:

  • An uncomplicated introduction to Uncomplicated Firewall | ZDNet

    When I first started using Linux, back in '97, working with the built-in firewall was not something just anyone could do. In fact, it was quite complicated. Starting around 1998, if you want to manage the security of a system, you had to learn iptables (which is a suite of commands for manipulating the Netfilter packet filtering system).

  • Best Wi-Fi Security & Performance Testing Tools for 2022

    The prevalence of Wi-Fi has been accelerating for two decades, but in the last two years, it’s surged even further as so many people were forced to work from home. That trend led to many strengthening the performance of their Wi-Fi networks. But security remains a problem.

  • CISA Adds 21 Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog [Ed: A huge chunk of these are Microsoft holes, actively exploited while Microsoft commandeers the media to obsess over "Linux"]

    CISA has added 21 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the "Date Added to Catalog" column, which will sort by descending dates.

  • Surfshark introduces Linux VPN app with a graphical user interface (GUI)

    Surfshark is one of the better-known VPN providers and is often seen being promoted by large YouTube accounts. Today, the company announced the availability of its VPN on Linux with an entire graphical user interface, or GUI.

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.