Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.
If you use Drupal it's strongly recommenced that you update it to the latest version.
A very serious flaw in the Internet's DNS servers may have been ripe for a significant exploit, though a familiar security researcher might have sounded the alarm just in time. Now, Microsoft and Linux vendors are responding urgently.
In what appears to be a coordinated effort to fix a well known, though still potentially critical vulnerability to the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol, patches are being deployed today for both Windows and Linux, by both Microsoft and Debian, respectively. These patches would enable a long suggested protocol for validating the source of DNS requests.
This is definitely an patch that every DNS server should do updates for. Do you think we are going to see DNS servers being attacked in the coming days?
Only 59.1% of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers, putting the remainder at risk from growing threats from diligent hackers, according to a new study published by researchers in Switzerland.
The study, published Tuesday, is one of the most comprehensive analyses of what versions of Web browsers people are using on the Internet. The study was conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM Internet Security Services.
It really does not surprise me that only 59.1% of user's browsers are up-to-date. But, what do you think is causing this? Are user's not taking updating their machines seriously?
Many users are undoubtedly not updating their browsers as quickly as they should, but you can't conclude any specifics about that from the recent study of Google logs.
The researchers who published a large study of Web browser security this week had a great idea and excellent data to work with. Too bad they overreached with their conclusions. A lot more is being made of this paper than is warranted.
What do you think is the most secure browser? This article looks at a study that tries to answer this question.
In this installment, I will cite an example of automated email code designed for another purpose. Nonetheless, I see it is a critical step to confirm the validity of the form's input. Moreover, unless and until I have received the expected human confirmation, that input is left in limbo [1.]. This is another means to prevent spurious, but uncaught data inputs. Thus, this limited human energy expenditure is a high return investment.
This article looks at the important security practice of web application input validation. Every time you take input from your web application check needs to be executed before your software does anything to that data. Do you have any tips for checking your user's input data for malicious data?
This weekend, we're going to look at a little something (actually a HUGE something) that we all seem to have to deal with now (through email, IM, etc). It's called phishing and, for lack of a better explanation, it's a fraudulent way for a malicious individual, or group, to get username and password information from you using deceptive practices (was that redundant? ;) It's most commonly used to get information regarding a person's online bank accounts, credit card/mortgage management information, etc. In other words, stuff that could really screw up their lives if someone else had it.
Phishing attacks are all too common, this article looks at tips to help combat this type of attack.
This tutorial explains how to set up PHPIDS on a web server with Apache2 and PHP5. PHPIDS (PHP-Intrusion Detection System) is a simple to use, well structured, fast and state-of-the-art security layer for your PHP based web application. The IDS neither strips, sanitizes nor filters any malicious input, it simply recognizes when an attacker tries to break your site and reacts in exactly the way you want it to. Based on a set of approved and heavily tested filter rules any attack is given a numerical impact rating which makes it easy to decide what kind of action should follow the hacking attempt. This could range from simple logging to sending out an emergency mail to the development team, displaying a warning message for the attacker or even ending the user’s session.
Have you ever hear of the web application called "PHPIDS"? According to the article it helps make your php web applications more secure, what do you think?
This script closely echoes previous scripts we put out to check on web server status and check on network server port-health insofar as the end result is concerned. It should run fairly simply, too (you'll probably just need to change the target host, target port and, possibly, the location of the ping command, and its arguments, to suit your taste - or have those all fed to the script from the command line using the @ARGV array):
Knowing the status of open ports on your computer is a good basic secure habit all Linux users should do. I use Nmap for all my port scanning needs but I found this simple port scanning script to be something to learn from. Have you wrote any good simple scripts to help your machines security?
Nmap (”Network Mapper”) is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. Nmap runs on most types of computers and both console and graphical versions are available.
This article is a quick user's guide to Nmap. I use this tool all the time it's a good easy to use tool for testing what services and ports are open.
Today we're going to grind through our "Lazy Sunday" post with a quick script to update SSH keys network-wide, by using rsh (the less secure of the two protocols). Once you've accomplished this (or have already accomplished this) and are happy with your network's SSH setup, I'd suggest disabling rsh altogether. Then you can move on to quickly setting up your SSH keys all over the network, focus on maintaining the integrity of your sessions, if you have issues with that, and even setting simple SCP routines to help keep your network easy to manage.
This article looks at how you can update your SSH Keys on your network with a simple script.
