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 configure Modsecurity 3 for WordPress on FreeBSD
Symbolic and Hard Links in UNIX and Linux
Symbolic and Hard Links are useful ways to reference to information on a disk, both found in UNIX and Linux systems. While they seem similar in the surface they are quite different in how they work and it what can be achieved when using them. If you find the articles in Adminbyaccident.com useful to you, […]
How to mitigate/solve the MDS vulnerabilities of Intel processors in FreeBSD
It had to happen again. Anyone betting on new hardware vulnerabilities on Intel processors would have won. This time these are called the MDS vulnerabilities, which stands for Microarchitectural Data Sampling. The trouble is the ones who would have really made big money would have been those stating the new CPUs were on the same […]
What is UNIX?
UNIX is an operating system. And your known equivalent is Windows or the Mac. You may even know about Linux. The purpose of an OS is to accommodate programs in order to get some work done. Editing pictures, browsing the web or serving data from a database. It is the thing that lets you operate […]
How to install OSSEC agents on Windows
On a recent post I published about how to install an OSSEC server on Ubuntu I explained how this solution can help secure an infrastructure by deploying agents which report back to a central server. This is the second part of this server-client story. On this guide you will read about setting up agents and […]
A brief introduction to SSL/TLS certificates
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 […]
How to install the ELK stack on CentOS 8
The ELK stack stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. These three pieces of software are very useful since each brings a powerful capability that in combination is just great to use. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash can process data from multiple sources. Kibana allows to visualize data in a graphic manner. These […]
How to install the bash shell on FreeBSD
Believe it or not the Bash shell does not come installed on the system. By default FreeBSD uses the sh shell (after the rewrite under the BSD license on 1989 of the original Bourne Shell found on UNIX, which had inherited the ‘sh’ name from the original’s Thomson shell), the C shell or the tcsh […]
Abandon Linux. How to export and import FreeBSD Jails ‘a la Docker’
FreeBSD Jails is an awesome tool similar to Docker but much older which allows administrators and developers alike to have several securely contained userland environments sharing one kernel. Does it sound familiar? This is operating-system-level virtualization and it’s different than what you find on KVM or Xen camps. For more detailed information I’ve published some […]
Lynis or how to quickly audit your system’s security configuration
A colleague of mine pointed me out to Lynis, a system’s configuration audit tool which checks the hardening of any running UNIX or UNIX-like system, including the BSDs. This tool has a built in check list and a set of sane and safe configurations and compares them to the target system. As output we find […]