From a penetration testing perspective to identify if a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is in place is essential. The next question is, does an administrator need to know this? My view is, anyone who is in charge of any system that has implemented some sort of WAF needs to verify this tool is working, at […]
How to detect a WAF – Web Application Firewall
Exploiting CVE-2019-0708 Remote Desktop Protocol on Windows
The CVE-2019-0708 is the number assigned to a very dangerous vulnerability found in the RDP protocol in Windows sytems. This is also known as the ‘Blue Keep’ vulnerability. The issue was so critical that Microsoft did even release patches to unsupported operating systems such as Windows XP or Server 2003. To this day there are […]
How to configure the IPFW firewall on FreeBSD
Among the three possible firewalls on FreeBSD (choice is always nice) IPFW is the in-house built one. There is a default, easy way, configuration path but if one needs to build a box to act as a dedicated network appliance with packet filtering capacity fine tunning the IPFW firewall configuration is more than desirable. Before […]
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 […]
How to install Drupal 9 on FreeBSD 13.0
Drupal 7 is approaching its original EOL (End of Life) date (Nov. 2021) which has been extended to November 2022 due to COVID’s impact. Most companies are using Linux already and have their upgrade plans in the works or are thinking about them. This is a good time to switch platform and use Drupal 9 […]
How to use Cloudflare’s Argo Tunnel service to publish a website on FreeBSD 12/13
What is the Cloudflare Argo Tunnel service? In short, a tunneled connection between a host and Cloudflare’s network. A longer depiction can be read in a blog entry of theirs, but I would put it as a secure way to connect the services you want to publish using their network as a shield. An example […]
WordPress administration over SSL
If you are a WordPress user or prettend to become one and you have some IT administration knowledge this guide is of your interest. Many hostings already provide easy point and click solutions to administer WordPress over SSL. However you may be self hosting WordPress or you’re just a curious person. What is TLS? TLS […]
How to set the locale in FreeBSD
The locale is the character set that will be used. And it is very important to match the keyboard you are using. Mind this also matters if you are transferring data to other systems. Different standards as the ASCII, UTF’s and the ISO’s, to name a few, have been put in place through the years […]
A word on Spectre and Meltdown
As professionals and many aficionados know, early this year some widespread vulnerabilities were found on Intel CPU’s as well as on AMD’s. It was a bit later discovered the flaws also affected some RISC architectures such as Power and ARM. Everybody went nuts and the world seemed to be tumbling because of two CPU vulnerabilities […]
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 […]