/dev/random

Some news have been disclosed about the next release of Ubuntu called “Lucid Lynx“. This new distribution is logically planned for April 2010 and will introduce, amongst a long list of new features, the “desktop socialization”. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, explained in an interview that the desktop will integrate new tools to interact [...]

The very first version of the UNIX operating system was born in Augustus 1969! Its early name was Multics (“Multiplexed Information and Computing Service“). Years after years new branches started to build a huge family of different operating systems, all of them descending from the same origin. It has always been my preferred environment and [...]

I’m just back from the last ISACA Belgian Chapter meeting. Topic of today was about the UNIX OS security audit process. A very large topic! The speaker was Sanjay Vaid. For years now, Linux is deployed in business environment. Linux systems can take several forms: applications servers (print, files, web, mail) but also firewalls, routers, [...]

On UNIX systems, log files are everywhere. Application are often very verbose (which is good!) but keeping an eye on logs can quickly become a nightmare! I’m a big fan of the tail command, specially the “-f” flag which does not stop the command once the end of file is reached but, instead, wait for [...]

A lot has been written about Ubuntu “Jaunty” 9.04 since it has been released. My corporate laptop runs Ubuntu very smoothly. Unfortunately, since the last Nvidia drivers upgrade, I faced a nasty bug. I was running version ’180-11′ but ’180-44′ is officially available by default in the latest release. No time to play with compilations [...]

OpenSSH is a wonderful tool box. The main purpose is to establish encrypted connections (SSH means Secure SHell) on a remote UNIX machine and, once authenticated, to spawn a shell to perform remote administration. Running on port 22 (default), the client (ssh) and the server (sshd) exchange encrypted information (what you type and the result [...]

For those who still ignore, Bash 4 is out for a few days! Bash is the most used shell on UNIX hosts. Bash has a built-in mechanism to save a log of all commands executed by the user (default in $HOME/.bash_history) but this file belongs to the user itself and can be altered or removed [...]

Here is a quick and dirty bash script which will take care of your files integrity. Integrity is a component of the CIA triad, I’ll not come back on this. For a personal project, I should be able to monitor any change in a specific file. I quickly wrote the code below. Nothing fancy, straight [...]

All people working with networks know the wonderful tool called Nmap. Basically, Nmap is a network scanner. It allows you to detect hosts on a network and services running on them. Just type “nmap <hostname|ip>” to perform a simple port scan. But Nmap can do much more! Host discovery, multiple scan techniques, version description and [...]

DLP stands for “Data Loss Prevention” or sometimes, “Data Leak Protection“. Companies primary goal is to make business. And their activities rely on their data (customers, databases, research results, statistics, source code, …). DLP is a security process which takes care of: monitoring, identify and protection of the data. The goal is to prevent confidential [...]