Security

Ubuntu Linux ships with the tool sudo all setup for you to use to perform any administrative tasks instead of giving you root user privileges. If you have used other flavors of Linux and performed any administrative tasks on them you will quite likely feel a bit constrained by sudo, even though you can do just about anything you can as root with sudo. In such cases you can enable the root user account which has been disabled by Ubuntu by default. Note: this could pose a security risk and is not recommended for beginners. [click to continue...]

If you use Ubuntu Linux it is quite likely that at some point or another you may have been frustrated at its asking for your password when trying to perform an administrative tasks, such as installing programs or changing system settings. Ubuntu uses the sudo tool to manage administrative rights rather than letting users easily log in as the root user. This is actually a good security measure. However, if you need to perform administrative tasks frequently it can get rather annoying. Here’s how you can set Ubuntu to not prompt for your password when using sudo. [click to continue...]

When people throw away important documents they usually use a shredder to make sure that these documents can’t be read by unauthorized people. Similarly companies run a shredding process on computers before either discarding or donating them. This is a good practice even for individuals. You don’t want someone getting hold of your personal data such as photographs, emails, bank documents, etc. Let’s look at how you too can clean up a hard drive before junking it or giving it away. [click to continue...]

These days there are a number of really cool MySQL front-end tools available for all platforms. Some are web based and can be installed on the MySQL server, while there are others which need to be installed on your local laptop or desktop computer. If you have a MySQL server running somewhere outside your local network you will most likely need to access it over the Internet to allow your super cool MySQL desktop client talk to it. You might be tempted to allow the MySQL server to run openly over the Internet to allow you access. That would be an extremely bad idea. Here’s a much better solution to allow you access without compromising much on security. [click to continue...]

We ran an article on How to block an IP address in iptables in Linux a few days ago. Here’s a complimentary article that shows you how to detect the IP addresses of attackers in case of a a denial of service (or DOS) attack. [click to continue...]

If you are responsible for a Linux server, security becomes a big concern. Some of the biggest threats to a server’s security are DDOS attacks and repeated attempts to enter the server using automates bots. There are a number of ways by which you can detect the IP address of a potential intruder. But what do you do after you have located his/her IP address? Well, you block it. Here’s how you do it using IPTables which is the firewall that ships with most flavors of Linux. [click to continue...]

This brief tutorial will take you through the steps required to disable Windows Defender in Windows 7. [click to continue...]

We covered the creation and extraction of compressed archives such as tar on a Linux machine. A lot of Linux users use these compression formats for backups purposes. Although this compresses pretty well it does not secure the backup. To do that you need to add a password, or to encrypt it. Let’s look at a simple form of securing your backup when you create an archive. [click to continue...]

Netstat is an extremely useful Linux command line tool that allows you to check which service is connecting to a port on your machine. It is very useful to analyze what’s going on on your machine when you are facing or trying to to prevent an attack on it. You can find information such as how many connection are being made on a port, which IP addresses these connections originate from, and much more. Netstat ships with most distributions of Linux so it should already be installed on yours. [click to continue...]

According to the ClamXav home page -

Today, the number of viruses actively attacking OS X users is…NONE! However, this doesn’t mean we should get complacent about checking incoming email attachments or web downloads, for two reasons. Firstly, there’s no guarantee that we Mac users will continue to enjoy the status quo, but more importantly, the majority of the computing world use machines running MS Windows, for which an enormous quantity of viruses exist, so we must be vigilant in checking the files we pass on to our friends and colleagues.

So - do you even need anti-virus software on your Mac? That’s up to you to decide. If you do decide you want anti-virus software on your Mac, this tutorial will guide you through installing and using ClamXav - a free (and frequently updated) virus scanner for OS X.

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Linux machines are known to be pretty secure. Studies have shown that Linux has been designed in a secure manner. Yet, despite all the security features that come bundled with a Linux installation, you need to configure these features correctly to make them work for you. I’ll guide you through the process of setting up of one of the tools that help secure your machine - the firewall. We will use the iptables firewall for this exercise. I am assuming that you are using a server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or similar. However, most of the steps should work fine on other Linux distributions as well. In this article we will setup a firewall on a Linux server running the Apache Web Server, FTP, and SSH. [click to continue...]

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This tutorial will show you how to hide .rar files within .jpg files - so that anyone who opens the picture would never know there was another file hidden within it. [click to continue...]

Have you ever forgotten your MySQL root password? It’s one of those things that just happens despite the numerous precautions one might take. As a result, you are locked out of your database server. You can’t create new databases and are left with little control over the state of your database server. In such situations knowing how to regain root access to your database server comes in handy. So here’s what you can do to reset the password for the root user in MySQL on both Windows and Linux. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through the steps required to set up everything in Windows XP to allow you to connect to an office (or other) VPN server. [click to continue...]