Australian university students have developed a Linux-based data forensics tool to help police churn through a growing backlog of computer-related criminal investigations.
The tool was developed by students from Edith Cowan University's School of Computing and Information Sciences and will help the Western Australian Police Computer Crime Squad process their forensic investigations. Called Simple (for Simple Image Preview Live Environment), the software allows investigators to view and acquire forensic data at the scene of the crime without compromising the integrity of data as it is collected.
There are tons of Linux forensics LiveCD distributions available, but what is your favorite?
Mozilla Messaging patched nine security vulnerabilities in Thunderbird Wednesday, the first time it's plugged holes in the e-mail software since early May. The bug patched in Thunderbird Wednesday that was fixed in Firefox last week was in the browser rendering engine's CSSValue array data structure. According to Mozilla, the vulnerability could be used by hackers to force a crash, and from there, run malicious code. Several other just-patched Thunderbird vulnerabilities could also be used by attackers to execute code remotely.
Are you in a rush to update your installation of Thunderbird with news that nine security vulnerabilities were found and patched on Wednesday?
Source: LinuxSecurity.com Contributors - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
This week, advisories were released for clamav, xulrunner, iceweasel, lighthttpd, libgd2, ruby, xemacs, wireshark, mysql, thunderbird, php, acroread, dnsmasq, firefox, and seamonkey. The distributors include Debian, Mandriva, Red Hat, Slackware, and Ubuntu.
Network Security Toolkit is one of many live CD Linux distributions focusing on network monitoring, analysis, and security. NST was designed to give network security administrators easy access to a comprehensive set of open source network applications, many of which are among the top 100 security tools recommended by insecure.org.
NST's latest version, 1.8.0, was released last month. You can download NST as a live CD ISO or as a VMware virtual machine from the author's site.
Have you ever used a Live CD which is designed to be used for network monitoring? If so, do you have any favorites? This article likes at one Live CD distro called "Network Security Toolkit".
Another howto by me concerning encryption. However this one will be pretty intense on graphics. I have a step-by-step guide on how to do a manual full encryption of the system.
Due to a bug current in the ubuntu installation, you cannot encrypt the swap partition directly during the manual install. The install will just hang. Here's a link to the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/231451
This article is a step by step guide to do a full encryption of a Linux system. The author provides snapshots in showing you how to do this.
NSA takes its Flask architecture to the open-source community to offer an inexpensive route to trusted systems.Architecture created by the National Security Agency and expanded with help from the open-source community will save the Defense Department and intelligence agencies millions in hardware costs.
With Flask, “we can guarantee that high-integrity data can’t be corrupted by untrustworthy entities or that sensitive data doesn’t leak to untrustworthy entities,” said Stephen Smalley, one of the chief developers of Flask at NSA. The best part is that the technology requires no specialized hardware or operating system.
What do you think about the Flask architecture? This article looks at this security architecture and how SELinux came about from it and it's impact on open source security.
With security becoming ever more important, I've been reviewing the various guides available to harden the VMware Virtual Infrastructure.
So far the results have been disappointing, though I've looked at the CISecurity VMware ESX Benchmark and the VMware VI3 Hardening Guidelines. Now for the US Government's Defense Information Systems Agency's Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)-a long-awaited document that all levels of the U.S. government will follow to harden and protect their VMware VI3 installations.
At first look at VM security you might think it's just like securing any hardware install OS. However, VM security come with it's own set of challenges. This likes at the security issues with hardening VMware ESX.
