OSSEC is a host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). It is specially well known for monitoring files that shouldn’t change on a system (such as critical system files, or binaries, etc) and warning administrators (or anyone you’d like) about those issues. But it does more such as rootkit detection and log analysis with a dedicated engine. […]
How to install OSSEC server on Ubuntu
How to install sudo in FreeBSD
Sudo is a very useful application. It allows a regular user to perform tasks only reserved to the root account. There is lots of documentation about sudo and there is even a book about it called “Sudo Mastery”. If you need to investigate deep on this, buy it. Why do you need this? Well… Everyone […]
How to compile cloudflared in FreeBSD 13/14
I happen to self-host my websites using Cloudflare’s services (article 1, article 2). Since the FreeBSD port seems to be delaying its releases and Cloudflare’s policy on maintaining versions only considers 1 year old code, in an act of prevention I have learnt, and I am publishing, how to compile cloudflared in FreeBSD. Note: At […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s with FreeBSD
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]
How to configure Modsecurity 3 for WordPress on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on how to install Modsecurity 3 on Apache HTTP for the FreeBSD operating system. However there’s a catch with that setting and with Modsecurity in general. As good as it is as a WAF you need to at least adjust its configuration to the tool one pretends […]
The LAMP stack (Debian 9)
LAMP stack stands for a software stack composed by Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Perl). It is used for many purposes and its common ground for system administrators. Since there are several of Linux distributions there are some differences in the way the LAMP stack is installed. In this guide we are using the […]
Web credentials stealing
The theft of credentials has been occurring since almost the beginning of time. But of course when the web ‘happened’ and specially when e-commerce exploded stealing passwords also went on the rise. Emptying bank accounts, ordering stuff on behalf (and expenses) of others, spying, even impersonation was and is achieved by stealing credentials. Luckily for […]
How to configure FreeBSD to use a webcam (version 12 and 13)
Introduction. Unlike many Linux distributions the FreeBSD operating system comes quite crude out of the box. What others will interpret as a disadvantage, with some knowledge on the system, others see the power to serve. Anyone willing to have a nice FreeBSD desktop experience with little effort, there are a couple of BSD-based distributions, like […]
FreeBSD Jails
The FreeBSD jails is a virtualization technology you may have skipped for too long. It is an operating system level virtualization and is one of the differential characteristics of FreeBSD from Linux. Solaris took it to the main corporate use with Zones and as it couldn’t be any other way the Illumos folks also play […]
The root account
Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]