Security Leftovers

• ClamAV 0.103.2 Is Released With Security Fixes For Four Vulnerabilities

  The free software anti-virus scanner ClamAV has, ironically, made a security release fixing four vulnerabilities. Two of them could cause it to crash, one could cause it to enter a endless loop and a Windows-specific vulnerability could lead to privilege escalation. ClamAV has 8,532,858 virus signatures it can scan for in its database.

• Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Play Games With Cyberwarfare as Its Power Declines

  In the SolarWinds hack, a backdoor in one of the components was downloaded to the systems of 18,000 organizations, including the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

  In the Microsoft Exchange Server hack, an estimated 250,000 machinesworldwide might have been affected by a vulnerability that allowed hackers to control the machines and even infect other systems in the internal network of the targeted companies. Four major vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server were reported to Microsoft in early January. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until early March that Microsoft released patches, according to ZDNet. These vulnerabilities were used by the hackers during the period that Microsoft had either not released the patches, or companies had not upgraded their systems and installed the patches.

 

• LinkedIn denies data leak after two-thirds user base is compromised

                   

                     

  Personal data of 500 million LinkedIn users, two thirds of its user base, has been scraped and is for sale online, according to a report from Cyber News.

                     

  The data up for sale on a popular hacker platform includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, workplace information and links to social media accounts of users hosted on the platform.

                   

• Linkedin data leak: Major breach exposes 500 million users on Microsoft platform [details]

                       

                         

  While people are yet to digest the huge Facebook data leak of 533 million users (including 6.1 million Indians), Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn is now facing a massive data leak of 500 million users that is allegedly being sold online.

                         

  An archive with data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular [cracker] forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the [crack].

Elephant and Its Ivory

LIVES at risk. This is a travesty. REPUBLIC OF NAMIBIA'S MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT, FORESTRY AND TOURISM: "We should manage elephants based on science and not emotions." By auctioning/selling off 170 live elephants? Give us a break. Oftentimes, animals were to make a sacrifice over humans because they are just "animals", so they can't speak to us, and can't protest. We're asked to assume they're just the least important, therefore we can eradicate (or "cull") them -- as simple as that. How I wish the the Animal Kingdom will become a force and burn this kind of society just to make a statement -- and then, maybe, humans will truly realise the value of animal rights. Shame on those African countries which don't give a shit about all those people who tirelessly devoted their time and life to protecting the wild animals, and specifically the elephants. Animals can't speak, but they can see you and they can feel you; just look into and gaze at their eyes, doesn't that give you a goosebumps? Burn. █

today's howtos

• Virtualization Performance on an Intel NUC 11 Enthusiast Phantom Canyon NUC11PHKi7C

  I've previously looked at Windows and Linux performance on the NUC11PHKi7C Enthusiast Phantom Canyon which is Intel’s latest NUC 11 flagship product specifically targeting gamers as it includes an NVIDIA RTX 2060 GPU. One usage aspect I didn't test was virtualization and this brief article looks at the performance running VirtualBox and WSL2 on the NUC11PHKi7C and comparing it to Intel’s previous NUC with a discrete GPU: the NUC 9 Extreme Ghost Canyon.

• How To Install and Configure Apache SVN Server On Linux Desktop

  The Apache server is widely used for running servers and sites over the internet. If you own a distributed server where many administrators work together on the same project, you probably face problems keeping a record of who made the server changes. Here comes the Apache SVN server that you can install on your Linux machine to keep the log of your server’s activity and changes. It can maintain the login data, documentation data, source code, and other revisions. The Apache subversion system allows users and contributors to make changes, add features, revise and modify the repository with keeping the change records. You can also backup, revert, override, update your repository and delete revisions through the Apache SVN tool.

• How to Create a Self-Signed SSL Certificate

  SSL certificates are used to facilitate authentication and encryption on the internet. Normally, these certificates are issued by trusted third-party certificate authorities such as Let’s Encrypt. A self-signed certificate is one that is obtained without going through any third-party certificate authority. TLS/SSL is a combination of a public certificate and a private key. The private key is stored securely on the server or on the load balancer, whereas the certificate is publicly accessible. In this tutorial, we explain how to create a self-signed SSL certificate by using the OpenSSL tool.

• How to install and configure pCloud on Fedora | FOSS Linux

  You might have heard and used cloud services like DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and many others. These have already integrated into various applications as an additional cloud storage option. However, one more cloud service seems to be taking the market by a storm due to its amazing features and plans. That’s the pCloud Service. pCloud is a cloud storage service from Switzerland and first launched in 2013. It is a cross-platform application with a desktop client available for Windows, Linux, macOS, IOS, and Android. When you first sign-up on pCloud, you are given 10GB of storage completely free. One of their amazing and competitive features is the security implemented on their systems. They even went ahead to hold a pCloud Crypto challenge that brought hackers worldwide to try and break their client-side encryption, but none of them succeeded. To ensure reliability in the availability of data, pCloud uses a distributed system architecture. All users’ data are distributed across five (5) servers stored in different locations. Therefore, when one server goes down, you are still assured of data availability. To ensure data security in transit (data being transmitted from your device to pCloud servers and vice versa), pCloud uses SSL/TLS protocols (Secure Socket Layer and Transport layer security. Like most cloud services available, pCloud comes with both free and paid plans. As you would expect, the latter comes with a lot more amazing features, including a lifetime plan.