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 […]

Lynis or how to quickly audit your system’s security configuration

How to configure FreeBSD to use a webcam (version 12 and 13)
Introduction. Unlike many Linux distributions the FreeBSD operating system comes quite crude out of the box. What others will interpret as a disadvantage, with some knowledge on the system, others see the power to serve. Anyone willing to have a nice FreeBSD desktop experience with little effort, there are a couple of BSD-based distributions, like […]

How to connect a FreeBSD box to the internet through an Android device via an USB port
FreeBSD is known to be very suitable for computer servers, from Netflix streaming to Whatsapp messaging as powerful examples. Some also use FreeBSD as a workstation OS. I am one of those using BSD on both camps, although I also use some GNU/Linux boxes for ‘trivial’ purposes. In modern times having an internet connection seems […]

How to work with Nessus scan results
Working with Nessus scan results is easy. How do I know that? Because I’ve worked with this tool for some time and although I do not know every corner of the things I’ve been doing some scans and solving quite a few deffects on systems that were labeled as ‘production ready’ when they clearly weren’t. […]

ARP spoofing attacks
ARP spoofing attacks are quite harming and they can easily constitute a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. They consist on the attacker sending ARP packets into the network the victim is located, typically redirecting traffic to the attacker’s machine. Once this is achieved the attacker can sniff all the traffic sent by the victim’s device and obtain […]

The Original Sin
Disclaimer: What you are about to read may contain inaccuracies. Feel free to discuss them somewhere else. This is also my opinion and as such it may change through time, maybe tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade or never. I do also make very few reviews (if any) of what I write here so […]

How to set CentOS 7 repositories
CentOS is the free open source replica of the well known Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). With a very good reputation because of its stability and performance RHEL is nowadays the dominating GNU/Linux distribution in the enterprise environment. As a gift, in a similar fashion to Microsoft’s Windows trial versions (without limits to the use), […]

A few useful network commands
Troubleshooting network issues with simple commands is not a very difficult topic once there is a little toolbox to pull from. Needless to say networking topics can be very complicated and any specialist on the field will tell you how cumbersome it can really get. However with a few set of commands one can get […]

How to export a MySQL database.
You are your website editor, owner and now administrator. You want control over the whole process and you are migrating from a managed site. Or you are a versed user on unix-like environments and you are just willing to export your database. This is a simple post on how to export a MySQL database. If […]

How to secure the ELK stack on CentOS 8
This is a follow up of the ‘how to install the ELK stack on CentOS 8’. That is a basic setup with no security at all. There is no encryption, no username and password setup, nothing. Not even firewall rules to filter ports. And as it’s known security can’t only rely on one factor but […]
