To keep your finger on the pulse of technology and security in higher education's institute check out the Educational Security Incidents site. ESI keeps you in touch with security incidents at universities and colleges around the nation and helps you know what you might need to rebuff your defenses and user education about. All in all, it's a lot of interesting reports about … [Read more...]
Securing an SSH Server
Some worthwhile reading regarding configuring and securing an SSH server: An SSH server can be set up in various ways, but in this document I’ll describe how it can be configured to: only support connections through the 2nd version of the SSH protocol (SSH-2) use DSA keys for user authentication, without permitting authentication with passwords allow only a specific group … [Read more...]
Wireshark – Free packet sniffer for Windows
Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer or "packet sniffer" and like all the other programs I show on this blog it's free. A network protocol analyzer has a lot of uses, primarily education and security. You can learn a lot about network traffic and protocols from observing the packets via Wireshark. From looking at the simplest of pings, you can understand how MAC addresses, … [Read more...]
AccessChk – Permissions Reporting Utility
I'm highlighting another SysInternals utility today with AccessChk. This little executable allows you to verify the permissions of directories and sub-folders easily. If you're having problems with a program not being able to write to a directory, a person unable to successfully launch an application, or any of the other hundreds of permission problems you can come across … [Read more...]
Gmail Helps with your Security Concerns, Pt. 2
From monitoring your Gmail session as I pointed out previously, another setting can be changed to help secure your data with Gmail. It is particularly wise to use an encrypted session for your Gmail at public access computers or over wireless connections. Log into Gmail. In the top-right corner, click the Settings link. This setting lies under the first page that comes up, … [Read more...]