Jun 252011
 

autoscanSometime it’s useful to do an assessment of what’s online on your network, probably you think to know every server and service running, but I had more than one surprise in the past, with “test server just plugged in for a short time”, “New test service” or worst, hacked machine that exposed “new service”.

Network scanning is a procedure for identifying active hosts on a network, either for the purpose of attacking them or for network security assessment. Scanning procedures, such as ping sweeps and port scans, return information about which IP addresses map to live host and the active ports on every server. Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Jun 242011
 

chainbreakSometimes happen that you find a sequence of links, and so you should start to follow them to see exactly what command are you about to run, or the directory used in that symbolic link, or you can use readlink.

readlink it’s contained in the package coreutils, so you should already have it.

The basic usage is readlink symbolic link and this give as output the full path of the real file following all the symbolic links.
Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Jun 242011
 

tuxOn our server we have (or you should have) tons of logs generated, logs from various daemons (ssh, iptables, monit, fail2ban), services (apache. nginx, bind, ftp, etc.) and system logs (syslog, messages, kernel).

So i’m sure that every day you check these logs and look if something bad has happened, right ?

Well, perhaps i’m more lazy, but i prefer to use an automatic log scanner, and among many an old good program is Logcheck Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Jun 212011
 

iconv Today post is by Juan Valencia, originally posted on his blog (available also in spanish there), i’ve found it really interesting with in deep articles regarding rsync,ssh and other commands.

When you receive and need to handle multiple text files that use characters that are not natural to the English language, you may run into the problem that is dealing with different character encodings. This is particularly noticeable in websites, where if the browser try to interpret the text file with an encoding that differs from the actual encoding that the file is using, we can see strange symbols where this characters were supposed to show, but it is not limited to websites, any program that is made to work with languages other than English may present a similar problem if it is not appropriately handled.

Continue reading »

Flattr this!

Jun 182011
 

ssh Today I present another excellent article by Domenico Raffaele originally presented in his blog (in Italian) where you can find many other interesting articles about hacks and VoIP. This is his second article about ssh.

Here you’ll see some example of SSH Port Forwarding, sometimes called SSH Tunneling, which allows you to establish a secure SSH session and then tunnel arbitrary TCP connections through it. Tunnels can be created at any time, with almost no effort and no programming, which makes them very appealing.

Continue reading »

Flattr this!