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
Category: Software
Take Care of Rogue Free Software Mirrors
Yesterday, first of May, the new OpenBSD release was made available! Like major big open source projects, to be able to serve all the download requests, the source code is available through mirrors around the world. I read the following post on the security-announce mailing list today: “It has come
Forensics: Reconstructing Data from Pcap Files
Sometimes during forensics investigations, it can be useful to recover deleted or temporary files transferred by users and/or processes with protocols like FTP or HTTP. Let’s see how to achieve this using pcap files! libpcap is an API which provides network packets capture facilities. Very common on Unix, there is
Strong Authentication with Linux
Next step in my investigations to implement a strong authentication process on my Linux laptop using the Yubikey. In a previous post, I explained how to use a Yubikey to authenticate on Linux with a PAM module. It works very well but, like I said in the previous article conclusion,
Boring Tasks Automation with Expect
It’s by human nature, we hate repetitive tasks! We always try to perform our job using the minimum actions possible. This is particularly true for Network or System administrators! There is nothing more boring than repetitive tasks… A good example? In the scope of a new monitoring platform, fifty Cisco
Nmap News
Fyodor has posted interesting news in nmap-hackers yesterday. First, a new beta version of Nmap is available for a few days (4.85BETA4). What’s new? Ncat and Ndiff tools are included, a lot of new NSE scripts, more than 5,000 version detection signatures, 2,000 OS fingerprints, improved scan performance and much
Yubikey Authentication on Linux
In a previous article, I presented the Yubikey product. I also explained why, for security reasons, the usage of two separate Yubikeys could be a plus. One converted to provide a static password and the second left as is (to provide one-time passwords). I received my 2nd Yubikey a few
Introduction to SEAT
SEAT – Search Engine Assessment Tool – is a tool dedicated to security professionals and/or pentesters . Using popular search engines, it search for interesting information stored in their caches. It also uses other types of public resources (see later). Popular search engines like Google or Yahoo! (non-exhaustive list) use
Dynamic Signature Verification
Authentication is a key point in security. How to be sure that the user behind the keyboard is really the one he pretend to be? A hand-written signature can by used as an authentication factor (but combined with another one – remember – strong authentication requires multiple factors). Basic signature
Bye-bye Acrobat Reader!
It’s decided! I get rid of all my Acrobat Readers! My primary environment is Linux but I also use Windows operating systems (virtualized or running on separated hardware). And today, you can’t life without a PDF reader! I looked for an alternative. My PDF reader is now Foxit. To make