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Linux Security Week: October 27th, 2008
Source: LinuxSecurity.com Contributors - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include "Detect Insider Threats With Linux Auditing," "Four Password Lockers To Keep Your Web Logins Secure," and "Perspectives Extension Improves HTTPS Security."
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Feature Extras:
Never Installed a Firewall on Ubuntu? Try Firestarter - When I typed on Google "Do I really need a firewall?" 695,000 results came across. And I'm pretty sure they must be saying "Hell yeah!". In my opinion, no one would ever recommend anyone to sit naked on the internet keeping in mind the insecurity internet carries these days, unless you really know what you are doing.
Read on for more information on Firestarter.
Review: Hacking Exposed Linux, Third Edition - "Hacking Exposed Linux" by ISECOM (Institute for Security and Open Methodologies) is a guide to help you secure your Linux environment. This book does not only help improve your security it looks at why you should. It does this by showing examples of real attacks and rates the importance of protecting yourself from being a victim of each type of attack.
Thank you for reading the LinuxSecurity.com
weekly security newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers
with a quick summary of each week's most relevant Linux security headline.
EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.21 Now Available (Oct 7)
Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.21 (Version 3.0, Release 21). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes and some feature enhancements to the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer and the SELinux policy.
In distribution since 2001, EnGarde Secure Community was one of the very first security platforms developed entirely from open source, and has been engineered from the ground-up to provide users and organizations with complete, secure Web functionality, DNS, database, e-mail security and even e-commerce.
SmoothWall Simplifies Open Source Security (Oct 24)
But Astaro is certainly not the only game in town -- another well known name in this market is SmoothWall Ltd, a UK based company which maintains an open source firewall project also called SmoothWall. This software has been evolving for the last eight years, the current version being called SmoothWall Express 3.0
The latest open source firewall appliance from UK company SmoothWall includes load balancing, web filtering, and can also act as a VPN gateway. Check it out in this informative article.
This article will cover basic security in CentOS, from securing SSH to installing and configuring a basic firewall. Since your VPS is pretty bare when we activate it, it is important to implement security as soon as you can to avoid being compromised. You will learn how to restrict access to your VPS to a small number of selected individuals (or PCs) and design a very simple but effective firewall solution.
Is CentOS your Linux distribution of choice? This article is for you, it talks about ways to make you installation more secure.
Detect Insider Threats With Linux Auditing (Oct 23)
Organizations of all sizes need to mitigate the risk of insider threats. Misconduct by authorized users represents a grave threat to an organization. According to the 2005 Computer Security Institute and Federal Bureau of Investigation Computer Crime and Security Survey, organizations reported that computer intrusions from inside sources accounted for nearly half of all incidents. You can secure your network perimeter with intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and virus scanners, but don't neglect to monitor authorized users. The Linux Audit daemon can help you detect violations of your security policies.
This article looks at the Linux Audit daemon. Do you use this Linux security tool? If so what do you think about it?
Virtualization--The Next Frontier For Hackers? (Oct 22)
Virtualization, with its rapid pace of adoption, is becoming a frontier for attackers, but not all businesses are aware of, or act on the risks adequately, according to market observers. Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that with the increasing prominence of virtualization, threats to virtual machines (VMs) are becoming more significant.
With any new technology attackers are going to try compromise it, this is true with virtualization. What do you think will it create new security risks?
Four Password Lockers To Keep Your Web Logins Secure (Oct 21)
It is good practice to use a different password for each Web site you need to log in to. Good passwords tend to be long and contain a wide selection of characters. That can make remembering all your passwords difficult. But you can make things easier on yourself by storing passwords for various Web sites in an encrypted file on your computer. I'll take a look at a four programs that give you easy access to your passwords when you need them and protect the password file itself against compromise.
Do you use any software to manage your passwords? This article looks at four of the more popular ones and reviews them.
The man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack is the attempt by an attacker to implant himself between the client (browser, mail client, IM client) and a server serving some web page or other content. The attacker receives all requests and responses to and from the server, reads the content and passes it along to either side.
Do you think we need to educate the users about Digital Certificates of web browsers? This article reviews the MITM attacks and how it should be prevented if it really happen. Read on for more information.
Ah, cryptographic security: a boon to those who understand the algorithms, but all too often a lost cause to those who don't. The secure HTTPS protocol for Web surfing is widely accepted, but has one fatal flaw: users ignore certificate error warnings. A Firefox extension called Perspectives aims to close that security hole.
What do you think about the Firefox extension called Perpsectives? I find it to report to many fail negatives.
