Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]

The root account

Web credentials stealing
The theft of credentials has been occurring since almost the beginning of time. But of course when the web ‘happened’ and specially when e-commerce exploded stealing passwords also went on the rise. Emptying bank accounts, ordering stuff on behalf (and expenses) of others, spying, even impersonation was and is achieved by stealing credentials. Luckily for […]

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. […]

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 Nextcloud on FreeBSD 12
Nextcloud. Have you heard of it? That’s quite probable if you’re here. But, what is it, what is it? Some say it is a Google Apps replacement, some say it’s just a place to store your documents, some others just rely on it to share documents across the company and edit them just in time […]

How to upgrade FreeBSD from version 11.2 up to 12.0
Although the upgrade process is very well described on the FreeBSD handbook you may be looking for a more detailed hands on how to upgrade FreeBSD from version 11.2 up to 12.0 article. We’re going work here on this process, step by step detailing not only how to upgrade but to do it safely. First […]

Why FreeBSD
In the following lines you will find a brief but sort of complete explanation about what is FreeBSD and why FreeBSD might be of your interest. If you are already a Mac or Linux user this could be more relevant for you than you would imagine. Enjoy. FreeBSD is an operating system, a unix-like operating […]

How to detect a WAF – Web Application Firewall
From a penetration testing perspective to identify if a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is in place is essential. The next question is, does an administrator need to know this? My view is, anyone who is in charge of any system that has implemented some sort of WAF needs to verify this tool is working, at […]

The LAMP stack (Debian 9)
LAMP stack stands for a software stack composed by Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Perl). It is used for many purposes and its common ground for system administrators. Since there are several of Linux distributions there are some differences in the way the LAMP stack is installed. In this guide we are using the […]

A brief introduction to Regular Expressions
A regular expression is a set of characters, a string of characters if you will, that specify a pattern. Ever used the grep command? It makes use of them. The ‘grep’ command is very handful when one needs to look for certain things inside a text file, or looking for some specific pattern from another […]
