Need an in-depth introduction to a new security topic? Our features articles will bring up up-to-date on everything from buffer overflows to SE Linux policy development.
System administrators make mistakes and that's fine, as long as they learn from them. Learning from your mistakes will develop more skills, advance your career, and make you a better systems admin. However, It’s also helpful to learn from the blunders of others. This is why I’ve compiled a list of common 10 mistakes that system admins make, and how to address these problems.
The primary goal of firewall penetration testing is to prevent unauthorized internet access to your organization's internal network, or check to make sure your security policy is doing what you think it's doing. In order to successfully test your organization's firewall, you must think like the adversary. Collecting intelligence on the network, such as operating system and firewall type, are important to know in order to proceed with the penetration test.
Nmap, short for “Network Mapper”, is an open-sourced tool for network discovery and auditing. It is now one of the most widely used tools for network mapping by system administrators. Nmap searches for hosts and services on a network.
maddog, as he’s affectionately known throughout the Linux and open source community, has made a career of being in the trenches with the Linux developers, teaching them the way of Open Source and Free Software development after decades of being involved with technology and education. In an exclusive interview with LinuxSecurity researchers, Jon "maddog" Hall, often referred to as “the Godfather of Linux”, reveals his history with Linux, some of his contributions to the community, a bit about its evolution, and his thoughts on what we might see with Linux in the coming years.
Real-time alerting is a feature of an IDS or any other monitoring application that notifies a person of an event in an acceptably short amount of time. The amount of time that is acceptable is different for every person.
The Qualys Research Team reached out to LinuxSecurity after discovering a memory corruption vulnerability in polkit’s pkexec. Pkexec is a SUID-root program that is installed by default on every major Linux distribution of the open-source operating system. This vulnerability is easily exploited and gives hackers the opportunity to gain full root privileges on a vulnerable host. Much like the Log4j vulnerability, the severity of this flaw is high and it is imperative that vulnerabilities are reported in a timely fashion. Experts also expressed that due to the simple possibility for exploitation the vulnerability needs to be patched and mitigated immediately.
Welcome to LinuxSecurity.com - the community's central source for information on Linux and open source security since 1996. Whether you’re a new visitor or a long-time community member, this article will provide you with insight into the mission behind our site, our history and the content we provide.
This document takes you through the basics of intrusion detection, the steps necessary to configure a host to run the snort network intrusion detection system, testing its operation, and alerting you to possible intrusion events.
Regardless of the Linux distribution you’re using, staying on top of the latest security advisories is essential in maintaining an updated, secure Linux system.
With the support of the open-source community behind it and a strict privilege system embedded in its architecture, Linux has security built into its design. That being said, gone are the days that Linux system administrators could get away with subpar security practices. Cyber criminals have come to view Linux as a viable attack target due to its growing popularity, the valuable devices it powers worldwide, and an array of dangerous new Linux malware variants that have emerged in recent years.
Predator-OS - "the OS that naturally preys on others"- is a free and open-source security-centric project for penetration testing and ethical hacking that can also be used as a privacy-focued, hardened Linux distro. LinuxSecurity researchers spoke with Founder and lead developer Hossein Seilany to get insight into the unique features and benefits that newly released Predator-OS 20.04 LTS offers hackers, pentesters and privacy-conscious Linux users.
Running PHP on a Linux web server is a prerequisite for the use of many popular applications such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Linux administrators and web developers must approach PHP with caution, as new vulnerabilities in poorly written and implemented PHP code are abundant and dangerous.
Security researchers have warned users that attackers are attempting to exploit a critical vulnerability in the Java logging library Apache Log4j. Log4j is a widely used java library that logs error messages in applications used by enterprise software applications as well as custom-built applications intended for in-house usage.
