Tag Archives: Security

[USN-885-1] Transmission vulnerabilities

=========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-885-1 January 14, 2010 transmission vulnerabilities CVE-2009-1757, CVE-2010-0012 =========================================================== It was discovered that the Transmission web interface was vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted web page in a browser while Transmission was running, an attacker could trigger commands… Read More »

Getting Started with Firewall Builder

This article is part of a series regarding firewalling and network security using the Firewall Builder tool on Ubuntu. This is user-contributed content. If you would like to contribute an article, please see the About page for contact information. Getting Started with Firewall Builder Author: [email protected] http://www.fwbuilder.org This guide starts a series of articles about… Read More »

Enable Timed or Automatic Login on Ubuntu 8.04

I have heard complaints here and there regarding Ubuntu requiring the user to login at boot time. I, personally, prefer this as I feel it ads a level of security to my machine, but I can see situations where it’d simply be annoying. If you are the only user on your machine and you’d like… Read More »

“What Would You Like To See?” Poll Expiring Tomorrow

I want to thank everyone for the great feedback that I got on the poll regarding what you’d like to see on this site. I think the results are pretty clear, although some of them did surprise me. For those that haven’t taken a look at the results they are as follows: Gnome Desktop Tips… Read More »

Tunnel Web and DNS Traffic Over SSH

I have been tunneling all of my web traffic over an encrypted SSH connection for some time now. Considering the fact that I travel a lot, I’m very regularly on untrusted, insecure networks. I prefer to secure those connections (web, IM, email, etc) by creating an encrypted SSH connection and pushing the traffic through it.… Read More »

Network Security with tcpwrappers (hosts.allow and hosts.deny)

I thought today I would outline a few tips on network security with tcpwrappers or, as you’re probably more familiar, the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files. How you can use them? What applications are compatible? etc. I know network security is a really broad topic, but this will hopefully be enough to get you going and… Read More »

7 Steps To An Encrypted Partition (local or removable disk)

Update : Encypted root file system option now available at installation in Ubuntu 7.10. See Install Time Ubuntu Encryption for more information. This last week I’ve been very interested in encryption. If you missed it you might be interested in my post on encrypting files or emails with GPG. In this tutorial I wanted to… Read More »

A Discussion on Grub Security

Today’s post isn’t so much a tutorial but more of a discussion or educational topic on grub. It was inspired by the original post here and continued discussion in the comments. I thought I would outline some suggestions on securing the grub boot loader and why Ubuntu adding a “rescue mode” entry in grub is… Read More »

Allowing Limited Sudo Access With Visudo

If you’ve used your Ubuntu machine for more than a week you’ve probably run into the sudo command. Particularly if you’ve followed any of my previous tutorials you’ve used it. Sudo allows you to run superuser commands on your machine, without needing a complete superuser account. Now what happens when you have another user on… Read More »

How to install Tor & Privoxy : (K)Ubuntu (6.06 / 6.10)

I have been using the Tor privacy network for quite some time now and I really appreciate the anonymity it allows me. It is very easy to setup on Ubuntu systems and basically offers you the freedom to surf and chat anonymously. No more tracking by marketers or wondering if someone can find you based… Read More »