SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it an old implementation of a crytographic protocol. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a new one. They are both used to have privacy in the communications between different parties. They are used to secure email, web browsing, instant messaging, etc These protocols work in a complex way […]

A brief introduction to SSL/TLS certificates

VMWare ESXi (One)
The VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor developed by the VMWare company and it is widely known and used in many environments and enterprises of all sorts. Nowadays it is the main component of a sort of a software suite. It is a type one hypervisor which means it runs directly on to the hardware controlling […]

ARP spoofing attacks
ARP spoofing attacks are quite harming and they can easily constitute a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. They consist on the attacker sending ARP packets into the network the victim is located, typically redirecting traffic to the attacker’s machine. Once this is achieved the attacker can sniff all the traffic sent by the victim’s device and obtain […]

Nmap cheatsheet
Nmap is a discovery tool used in security circles but very useful for network administrators or sysadmins. One can get information about operating systems, open ports, running apps with quite good accuracy. It can even be used in substitution to vulnerability scanners such as Nessus or OpenVAS for not very large environments, or quick audits. […]

How to install OpenVAS on FreeBSD
Was ist das? OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner. If you are unfamiliar to the vulnerability scanning world this can be an overwhelmingly experience but tools like this are what makes the matter more accessible, more manageable, easy to see and easy to fix. Before digging into the matter at hand here, that is how to […]

How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s laptop with Ubuntu
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 install Nessus 10 on FreeBSD 12
Nessus is a professional vulnerability scanner from the reputable cybersecurity company Tenable. I have already written about it in the past but installing it on a GNU/Linux distro. This very article will guide anyone to install Nessus 10 on FreeBSD, since Tenable is releasing binaries for FreeBSD 11 and 12 as of the time of […]

How to install Redis for WordPress on FreeBSD
I happen to self-host a few WordPress sites on FreeBSD. And as much as one can configure OP-Cache to improve PHP’s performance, object cache is a must for many WordPress sites. This how to install Redis for WordPress on FreeBSD will explain how to install an object cache (Redis) for WordPress (via plugin) on this […]

How to install OSSEC server on Ubuntu
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 improve Apache HTTP performance on FreeBSD
There are some nice articles on the internet telling you how to improve your Apache HTTP server’s performance. I did my bit on FreeBSD land. While turning on a different MPM than the prefork default one increases Apache HTTP performance by a lot, it is not the only thing one may do. For example if […]
