One-Time

Linux security (2017 edition) The year is closing, so it is time to review Linux security. Like last year, we look at the state of Linux security. A collection of the finest moments. Did we forget something important? Let us know in the comments. This post will remain updated in the upcoming weeks. As this post may appear on HN, Reddit, Slashdot, and other high-traffic sites, this post is heavily cached.

The end of Adobe’s Flash Player is near. Most of the remaining Flash on the web are advertisements or “fancy” movies, created years ago. If you don’t need Flash any longer, these steps help you to disable it in Chrome. Step 1: Open plugins Go to chrome://plugins This will show an overview of all your plugins. Step 2: Disable Abode Flash Player Press Disable on the Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Flash Player is disabled

Important Note This is an older blog post and we no longer advise using Web of Trust. See pcmag for more details. Protecting the web browser Usually we focus on the blog on the server side of things, helping to protect the data of users, customers and ourselves. What we commonly overlook is the end of the connection, the web browser of the user. In the upcoming posts we will look at alternative measures we can take, to protect data there as well.

Lynis 2.x will bring security auditing of Linux and Unix systems to a new level. In this blog post we share some exciting new features. Release of Lynis 2 is planned for February 2015. Overview: History Lynis 2.x Plugins Systemd Support File Integrity Monitoring Containers & Virtualization Operating Systems Focus on Simplicity Free and Commercial Support History Lynis has been created in 2007, as a follow-up on the well-known tool Rootkit Hunter (rkhunter).

Professionals ask us often how Lynis is different than Tenable Nessus. As the original author of Lynis, let me address that very interesting question. Different goal Nessus is focused on vulnerability scanning, or in other words, finding weaknesses in you environment. The huge amount of plugins and their actions show that this is the primary focus. Along the way it started to implement others services, like compliance checking. Lynis also detects vulnerabilities, but that is not its main goal.

Tutorial for Lynis installation on Arch Linux Pacman Arch Linux is getting more popular due to its great community support and the way it is organized. Being a “rolling release” system, it is continuously up-to-date. Still, you want to make sure your security defenses are equally up-to-date, so that’s where Lynis comes in. Normally pacman is used for installing new packages. Unfortunately, the lynis package does not show up. # pacman -Ss lynis # pacman -Ss rkhunter community/rkhunter 1.

Protect against Shellshock Shellshock is a serious software weakness, or vulnerability, in Bash. This shell is used on almost all Unix based systems, including Debian and Ubuntu. As it can be used without much effort and remotely exploit systems, it has a maximum vulnerability score according to CVSS. Upgrade Bash First update the software repository with apt-get, using the update parameter. apt-get update && apt-get install -only-upgrade bash Your system should now have a newer version of bash.

Bash is one of the most used shells on Unix based systems. The newly discovered “shellshock” vulnerability affects millions of systems. The weakness abuses an internal check when Bash gets a variable declaration. By defining this variable and putting more “stuff” (commands) in it, Bash will actually execute those commands as well. Unfortunately this results in several possible ways to exploit it by attackers. Websites One way this vulnerability scan be exploited, is by embedding it in HTTP requests.

Our security auditing tool Lynis is a toolkit consisting of several shell scripts. Many users of the software actually never realized it was written as a bunch of shells scripts. Now that the secret is out, it is time to learn why we used shell scripting. Here are 5 reasons! 1. Shell scripting is powerful Yes, people asked us why our tool Lynis was not written in Perl, Python, Ruby, C++ etc.

This week a vulnerability was reported in versions up to Lynis 1.5.4. With Lynis being a security audit tool and focused on hardening Linux and Unix based systems, we regret any (security) bug being discovered. Since it is open source software, we like to be open about the issue, to help you understanding it and take the right precautions. Description: The temporary files created in the tests_webservers section are too predictable.

Within this “how to” we explain when and how to use Lynis plugins. What are plugins? Plugins are small extensions to an existing program. Also Lynis supports the use of external plugins to extend functionality. Lynis plugins are written in shell script and might use system binaries or external binaries to perform additional checks. The big difference between custom tests and plugins in Lynis, are the goal of the tests. If some logic function checks a value and can inform the user to take an action, it’s better to use a normal test.

People wonder about the main differences between Lynis and the Lynis Enterprise version. In this article we have a look on what both products are and how you can choose between the two. Lynis Lynis is a security auditing tool for Linux and Unix based systems. With its GPLv3 license it’s open source and freely available. The tool was first released in 2007 and has undergone a lot of development during the years.

At the end of each Lynis scan, the report will be displayed. This report will include the findings (warnings and suggestions) and general information like the number of security tests performed. Additionally, the location of the log file and report data will be displayed. Between all this information there is a “Lynis hardening index” displayed. This index is unique to Lynis. The index gives the auditor an impression on how well a system is hardened.

Normal Lynis scans take a few minutes to complete, therefore any test taking more than 1 minute, might be stuck during its test. Within this article we have a look at a few things you can do. When a particular test is taking a long time, the test might be stuck. However, that’s not always the case. To determine what Lynis is doing, open up a second terminal and start with running ps aux to see what processes are active.