Security, Systems

Certificate Transparency Logs

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Due to the ever increasing list of network compromises, securing our online presence has become more crucial than ever. One way to ensure online security is to use SSL/TLS certificates, which encrypt data transmissions between servers and clients, making them unreadable to any third-party. However, these certificates can be compromised, causing severe security breaches. This was seen back in 2011 with certificate authorities Comodo & DigiNotar. Read more here. There have been around 10 CA compromises in the last 3 – 4 years. Still a rare issue but one that needs consideration. That is where Certificate Transparency comes in, which is an open framework for monitoring SSL/TLS certificates.

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Uncategorized

Top 10 Indicators of Corporate Fraud

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It is well understood that corporate fraud can have devastating consequences for an organization and that detecting and preventing fraud is essential for safeguarding the interests of the owners, investors, employees, and customers. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the leading indicators of potential corporate fraud so that companies can take proactive steps to mitigate the risk of fraudulent activity. This post will explore 10 leading indicators of potential fraud that should be taken seriously. It should be noted that the presence of these flaws are no guarantee of fraud and could just point towards poor management practices or errors in accounting procedures. However, it is essential that thorough routine investigations and analysis be conducted to determine if there is actual fraudulent activity taking place.

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Networks, Systems

Fiber Factoids, Part 1 – A primer on common fiber optic cable types

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If you’ve been in the IT industry for any amount of time you are likely to have ran across fiber optic patch cables in use in various different installations. Typically, you will most often see fiber optic cables used for an uplink to an internet service provider, in between network devices between buildings in a campus network, or in a datacenter where large amounts of bandwidth and high speeds are required.

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Networks, Quick Tips

What is a null route and why do I need one?

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Definition

There are several names for a null route, such as a “bit bucket”, a “black hole”, or just a null0 route. They all refer to the same basic mechanism that points traffic to a virtual interface on a router. That in turn is used for managing unwanted traffic to prevent loops or entering routes into the RIB (routing information base) of a router.

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Networks, Security

FIREPOWER DNS Sinkhole

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Many admins inadvertently design a sinkhole by null routing unused ranges within their core in order to limit unnecessary traffic. Some may even advertise these ranges from a Linux server running zebra or quagga for advanced alerting while monitoring for the propagation of worms or enumeration scans. In this post, we will discuss a similar idea for DNS using Firepower.

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Systems

Basic DHCP Setup

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Introduction

When it comes to efficiently assigning IP addresses to multiple clients, DHCP is the de facto standard in most networks. In this post, we’ll explore DHCP configuration on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and give an example of how to install it, as well as a few configuration options for dhcpd. With a basic understanding of DHCP, you can get your network up and running almost immediately.

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Networks, Security

Unboxing and initial setup of a Meraki MX Security Appliance

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Meraki is a pretty well known company, and has been a part of Cisco since 2012. There are a multitude of cloud based managed Wi-Fi solutions, but Meraki is one of the most prolific and has a variety of cloud managed products to suit most any size company’s needs. Several of their devices have similar setup steps, but today we will cover the initial out of the box setup of a Meraki MX64 security appliance that will have your MX appliance online and configured in your dashboard in no time.

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Security, Systems

AIDE – File Integrity Monitoring

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The idea of using file integrity monitoring to validate your operating system and applications has been around since the late ’90s, with programs like Tripwire. Today, we have a steady stream of companies offering their own version for FIM. However, one consistent and reliable open source solution for Linux is AIDE or the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment.

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