/dev/random

Years after years, OpenSSH became the default SSH daemon on most of UNIX environments as well as other systems. It offers a lot of features which make it terribly customizable and powerful. For a while, the ‘Match” keyword appeared in the list of directives. It allows conditional blocks of configuration directives. If the criteria(s) defined [...]

I was looking for a Nagios application to install on my iPhone for tests purpose and I was surprised to find more hits than expected. It’s true that Nagios is one of the best (if not THE best) open-source monitoring solutions. There is a huge community of developers and contributors busy to add extra features [...]

When you are connected to a network (Internet or private), your TCP/IP stack must know which DNS server(s) use to resolve host names into IP addresses. For a while, publicly alternative DNS servers – like OpenDNS or Google DNS – implemented a blacklist protection mechanism. If a domain is suspected of delivering malicious content such [...]

URL shortener on-line services are very helpful. You probably already use them every day. With mobile Internet and micro-blogging services like Twitter , it’s much more convenient to use short URLs. But the downside is, once again, the bad guys who quickly understood the opportunity of new type of attacks. It’s so easy to hide [...]

For a long time ago, I did not write about OpenBSD which remains one of my favorite operating system. The last version (4.7) was released in May and introduced, as usual, a lot of interesting changes. OpenBSD comes of course with it’s own firewall called pf (“packet filter“). Plenty of features are available but pf [...]

Everybody agrees to consider “security by obscurity” a false sense of security. By using this principle, the security of an information system in (falsely) increased by hiding sensitive details. Such information can be removed like: by altering the application welcome banner (in Apache, sendmail, etc), by changing the default port (example: binding your SSH daemon [...]

A quick and dirty tip if you need to keep a Windows workstation or server console unlocked. This can be required for several purposes, good or bad. In my case, I’m working on a workstation to access network resources. I don’t have a login and cannot know the local password. Every time the screen gets [...]

Everything has been said about the “cloud”, or more precisely, “cloud computing”. Like any new technology, there are pro and con, good and bad things. BTW, the cloud is not so new. For a while, lot of organizations already used a cloud infrastructure but it remained a “private cloud”. Since it moved to the Internet, [...]

The brand new firmware for the iPhone announced by Apple a few weeks ago is publicly available since yesterday. Called “iOS4” (special dedicace for cisco.com), it includes more than 100 new features like multitasking, folders, etc. I won’t review them here, there are multiple complete reviews already available online. Google is your best friend! But, [...]

It was discussed during the last edition of BlackHat Europe: Maltego v3 was almost ready to be released. Today is the D-day: The latest version is out! A quick reminder for those who still not know the product: “Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It will offer you timous mining and gathering [...]