Attackers hack Linux Mint website to add ISO with backdoor

“I’m sorry I have to come with bad news,” wrote Clement Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, before announcing Linux Mint suffered an intrusion; on February 20, “hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.”It’s not all Linux Mint, ranked by DistroWatch as the most popular Linux distribution for the last year, that were affected, but only the ISO for Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition downloaded from the site on Saturday. Lefebvre noted that other ISO releases downloaded from the site on Feb. 20 as well as the Cinnamon edition ISOs downloaded via torrents or a direct HTTP link should not be affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Live 2016 Europe

Hi CLEUR! This year, for the fourth year in a row, I’ve attended Cisco Live Europe. I’ve earned the “Netvet” status, that means my name was on the wall before the keynote, ain’t that great? ;-) Aesthetics apart, this year’s event was the biggest I’ve attended so far, twelve thousands people in a huge venue […]

ContainerWorld2016 conference in review – Part I

© ContainerWorld (Informa) - Taken from container world photo gallery
One would think that attending a multi-day conference is sedentary, just meeting new people and lending your ear to speakers and watching presentations. On the contrary it isn't so. Its extremely tiring and by the end of the day you are completely drained out. In this sense,  ContainerWorld2016  that took place last week (17th, 18th Feb) proved no different than other conferences and I ended quite exhausted at the end of the conference. Although exhausting, it was informative and it turned out to be more of a vendor neutral & community oriented conference compared to many others. Talk subjects varied from customer production deployment of containers to pain points of adopting the cloud native model. This multi-part post tries to summarize take-aways and interesting discussions that took place over the two days.

The conference was well received with participation from multiple vendors and customers such as RedHat, Canonical, Docker, Google, Yelp, CapitalOne, Paypal, eBay, Netflix, Veritas and Nordstrom to name a few. Right from day one keynote all the way to closing remarks on day two, customers and vendors alike reasoned the various advantages Continue reading

The top Wi-Fi pen testing tools in Kali Linux 2.0

Last August Offensive Security released Kali Linux 2.0, the Linux distro that’s pretty much everybody’s favorite penetration-testing toolkit (if it’s not your favorite, let me know what you prefer). This release was, to borrow a word from the kool kids, epic. Kali Linux 2.0 is based on Debian 8 (“Jessie”) which means that it’s now using the Linux 4.0 kernel which has a sizable list of changes. The biggest change in version 2.0 is arguably the addition of rolling releases which means that all of the latest versions of the included packages will be available as normal updates thus future point releases will really be snapshots rather than completely new builds. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Naming of Hosts

The Naming of Hosts

The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there’s the CNAME you want to use daily,
Such as nms, intranet, HR or games–
Such as payroll, or passwordchange, IT or training,
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound better,
Vendors and products that all sound the same,
Such as PeopleSoft, OpenView, Cisco, or NetApp–
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a host needs a name that’s unusual,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can it justify license renewals,
Or memory upgrades, or hybrid flash drives?

For names of this kind, I can give you a standard,
Twelve bytes for location, and fifteen for app,
These names are the ones that are never remembered,
They’re cryptic, unreadable, frustrating crap.

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover–
But Continue reading

Response: Why You Shouldn’t Be Hosting Your DNS

Michelle Chubirka from Post Modern Security  spent ten years as a sysadmin with a primary focus on managing a BIND DNS for a very large university in the US. With some regret, she says: This history makes what I’m about to recommend even more shocking. Outside of service providers, I no longer believe that organizations should […]

The post Response: Why You Shouldn’t Be Hosting Your DNS appeared first on EtherealMind.

Ansible Roles and Variables

While automation is great, we have to be careful not to recreate past problems. What I mean is that playbooks should be written in a generic fashion that can be applied to more than one host. If we’re writing playbooks that only work on one single host, we aren’t much further ahead than we were before.

Two of the key components of making playbooks reusable are Ansible variables and roles.  Let’s try and define each of them individually and while showing some examples along the way.

Roles
Roles allow you to call a set of variables, tasks, and handlers by simply specifying a defined role.  Roles require the use of a defined file structure in order to work.  Per the Ansible documentation, that structure looks like this…

image 
Roles are really just a way to split up your playbook into smaller reusable parts.  For instance, let’s consider we added another host to our lab…

image 
Now look at this playbook…

---
- hosts: linuxservers
  tasks:
    - name: Install Apache Web Server
      yum: name=httpd state=latest
      notify:
        - openport
        - startwebserver
  handlers:
    - name: openport
      service: name=httpd state=started
    - name: startwebserver
      firewalld: port=80/tcp permanent=true state=enabled immediate=yes

- hosts:  Continue reading

On Demand Network Labs [FREE]

Way too often do we want to learn a new technology, but end up spending countless hours just getting the product, tool, or technology downloaded, installed, and at a point to begin using. This is unacceptable.

We need a platform that offers on-demand network infrastructure labs that makes it extremely easy to test and learn how to use network device APIs, how to write code against a network device, and how to use DevOps tool chains in the context of networking.

It’s true, this has all become easier with tools such as Virtual Box and Vagrant, but you can still spend the same amount of time getting the underlying infrastructure setup as you spend on the actual tests you need to perform. In that model, you also need to be able have enough horsepower to run enough virtual machines as well, which often isn’t the case. On top of that, many Enterprises don’t allow tools such as these to be installed.

On Demand Network Labs

What I am proposing and getting ready to launch is a cloud based platform that allows you to launch pre-built network topologies in minutes. Upon launch, they are ready to be used, automated, and managed Continue reading

On Demand Network Labs [FREE]

Way too often do we want to learn a new technology, but end up spending countless hours just getting the product, tool, or technology downloaded, installed, and at a point to begin using. This is unacceptable.

We need a platform that offers on-demand network infrastructure labs that makes it extremely easy to test and learn how to use network device APIs, how to write code against a network device, and how to use DevOps tool chains in the context of networking.

It’s true, this has all become easier with tools such as Virtual Box and Vagrant, but you can still spend the same amount of time getting the underlying infrastructure setup as you spend on the actual tests you need to perform. In that model, you also need to be able have enough horsepower to run enough virtual machines as well, which often isn’t the case. On top of that, many Enterprises don’t allow tools such as these to be installed.

On Demand Network Labs

What I am proposing and getting ready to launch is a cloud based platform that allows you to launch pre-built network topologies in minutes. Upon launch, they are ready to be used, automated, and managed Continue reading

About McAfee’s claim he could unlock iPhone

So John McAfee has claimed he could unlock the terrorist's iPhone. Is there any truth to this?

http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-ill-decrypt-san-bernardino-phone-for-free-2016-2

No, of course this is bogus. If McAfee could do it, then he's already have done it.

In other words, if it were possible, he'd just say "we've unlocked an iPhone 5c running iOS 9 by exploiting {LTE baseband, USB stack, WiFi stack, etc.}, and we can therefore do the same thing for the terrorist's phone". Otherwise, it's just bluster, because everyone knows the FBI won't let McAfee near the phone in question without proof he could actually accomplish the task.

There's a lot of bluster in the hacking community like this. There is a big difference between those who have done, and those who claim they could do.

I suggest LTE baseband, USB stack, and WiFi stack because that's how I'd attack the phone. WiFi these days is pretty well tested, so that's the least likely, but LTE and USB should be wide open. I wouldn't do anything to help the FBI, though. The corrupt FBI goes around threatening security-researchers like me, trampling on our rights, so they've burned a lot of bridges with precisely the people Continue reading

Tips for migrating applications to Software Defined Networks

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not advocate a position that is particular to the author’s employer and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.Software Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the hottest trends in security and networking right now. Many enterprises are considering moving to virtualized networks such as VMware NSX as part of an overall shift from relatively inflexible hardware-based architectures to nimbler, faster, more scalable virtualized deployments.But as with any migration project, careful planning and management is required. Here we look at the steps involved in an SDN migration and what you need to consider at each stage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Products for Success

As the industry transitions into the next era of IT, the flood of data and application growth is forcing Cloud-based network architectures to change radically (for more info take a look here). This shift is causing an increased emphasis on tools and service integration rather than a focus on individual components. The emerging role of Cloud Architect is tasked with delivering agility and cost savings through automation, resource elasticity, data and application mobility and workflow integration. We’ve identified this new role and have the tools that will enable Cloud Builders to be successful—Plexxi Control software, Plexxi Connect and Plexxi Switch. Interested in learning more? Take a look at our solutions brief on networking for Cloud Builders.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

ITBusinessEdge: Striving Toward Unified Enterprise Infrastructure
By Arthur Cole
Most enterprises are already realizing some of the benefits of cloud computing in the form of lower capital and operating costs, better scalability and access to more modern, robust infrastructure. But if they are not careful, they run the risk of migrating workloads onto too many disparate platforms, creating the same kinds of data silos that currently Continue reading

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