Category Archives: Security

Certificate Transparency Logs

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.

Continue reading Certificate Transparency Logs

FIREPOWER DNS Sinkhole

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.

Continue reading FIREPOWER DNS Sinkhole

Unboxing and initial setup of a Meraki MX Security Appliance

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.

Continue reading

AIDE – File Integrity Monitoring

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.

Continue reading AIDE – File Integrity Monitoring

GPG Lab

Although we have seen examples of how to install gpg for Windows and integrate with Outlook, this class lab is designed to get gpg working in Linux with the Evolution email client.

Generate a Key for signing only


# gpg --gen-key
Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA and RSA (default)
(2) DSA and Elgamal
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 1
What keysize do you want? (4096) Continue reading GPG Lab