Millions of emails are sent and received every day. Most of them are just junk. And many among those are potentially harmful. Phishing still is one of the most effective ways for malicious actors to penetrate into well secured networks. The weakest link, too often, is the human factor. Training can help mitigate this 24×7 […]

How to analyze suspicious email

100 articles mark at Adminbyaccident.com
This is the 100th post here at Adminbyaccident. Little I knew when I starting posting that I would reach the ‘impossible’ mark of the 100 articles. Sure, some of them are not very interesting, nor instructive. Three years ago I wasn’t the same and I hope in three years time I’m still here and kicking. […]

How to update FreeBSD with freebsd-update
Anytime you set a clean fresh FreeBSD install or just any other operating system you must update it. This should be the first thing. If you are a bit security aware (read paranoid) you can first set up the firewall rules and then update the system to the latest release where you have all the […]

How to install RKHunter on FreeBSD
In this post you will find simple instructions to install rkhunter on FreeBSD which is a root kit “hunter” so your system/s will have some security in place for that kind of unwanted software. But for those who do not know what a rootkit is, let’s give it a simple definition (which you can get […]

How to patch Spectre and Meltdown the ROM way
In a previous article I briefly, sort of, talked about the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. I have also written two guides to patch them from the OS side using a UNIX flavour from the BSD camp and a GNU/Linux distribution. Both actions resulted successful but there is a third way to patch this vulnerabilities. Regular […]

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 configure the PF firewall on FreeBSD
There are three firewall options on FreeBSD. The in-house built IPFW, the ‘old’ IPF (known as IP Filter) and PF ported from OpenBSD. PF is a very popular piece of software which was originally sparked from an issue on the IPF license that prevented making changes publicly available, which the OpenBSD did all the time. […]

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 […]

What is Expect?
Expect is a handy scripting tool for task automation. You may have never heard of it. I heard about many scripting things before. But one day I needed something simple but didn’t know how to proceed, what would be a good tool for my purpose. The task was simple. Exporting a website content from a […]

What is GNU/Linux?
To answer this question one must split it. Plus make other questions like: «What is a, so called, Linux distro?». It seems complex and it is in a way. But let´s explain GNU/Linux in simple terms. GNU stands for GNU is Not UNIX. So it´s clear is not UNIX but it´s related to it in […]
