Pluggable authentication modules (PAM) are a mechanism to integrate multiple low-level authentication schemes into a high-level application programming interface (API). It allows programs that rely on authentication to be written independent of the underlying authentication scheme. PAM was first proposed by Sun Microsystems in an Open Software Foundation Request for Comments (RFC) 86.0 dated October … Read more
Firewall Builder is a GUI application that allows you to create sophisticated firewall rules. Currently only version 4 is available in the Ubuntu repositories, so here is how to install version 5 in Ubuntu: 1. From a Terminal window type: wget http://www.fwbuilder.org/PACKAGE-GPG-KEY-fwbuilder.asc -0- | sudo apt-key add – 2. Add the line deb http://packages.fwbuilder.org/deb/stable/ VersionName … Read more
I was actually browsing through the Freedombox site to look at the project and when I clicked on one of the links to the Linux Foundation I received the breach notification that now reads (Condensed Version): “Linux Foundation infrastructure including LinuxFoundation.org, Linux.com, and their subdomains are down for maintenance due to a security breach that … Read more
Here is Justin’s top 5 UNIX security books. Title Author ISBN Practical UNIX and Internet Security Garfinkel and Spafford 1-56592-148-8 UNIX System Security David Curry 0-201-60640-2 The UNIX Programming Environment Kernighan and Pike 0-13-937681-X UNIX & Linux System Administration Handbook Nemeth et al 0-13-151051-7 Building Internet Firewalls O’Reilly and Assoc 1-56592-124-0
The Fedora Infrastructure was recently compromised. Hopefully they secured the systems using the CIS Redhat Linux hardening guide.
As the Ubuntu’s new tag line says “It’s time for a change.”, indeed a lot of change has been implemented to the operating system, applications and the interface. There are few which you will find it interesting and useful and while few others might annoy you because of a sudden change. I never liked Ubuntu … Read more
Here is how you can compile the mother of all editors on Ubuntu 10.04 from source: 1. Obtain the source archive for Emacs from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ 2. Open a Terminal in Ubuntu and type: A. sudo apt-get install build-essential libxpm-dev libgif-dev libtiff4-dev B. This will install the necessary packages to compile Emacs. 3. Extract the Emacs … Read more
Here is some code that will add some security to your /etc/sshd_config file: Enable X11Forwarding Force Version 2 of the protocol Disable all the usual RHosts garbage Disable root logons Disable the use of empty passwords Copy the code below to a text file and make it executable then run it using the sudo command. … Read more
Put together a couple of simple shell scripts that will automatically download the latest deb stable release for Ubuntu/Debian and installing it via dpkg. Below are the two scripts for both 32 and 64 bit architectures. You could easily drop these in /etc/cron.daily to have nightly builds done. I386(32 Bit) Script X64(64 Bit) Script