Posts Tagged Data security
Quick Tips on Secure Shell
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Best Practices, Cloud Computing Security on January 17, 2010
SSH is a perfect security alternative to Telnet and has been used by system administrators and IT managers to configure and implement servers and network devices, here I wanted to list manual on Secure Shell usage.
First let’s start by choosing SSH client here we will find no problem because generally there are two accepted solutions PuTTY and SecureCRT, both are really good. But while SecureCRT is not a free solution we find that many IT Technician prefer to use PuTTY.
With using PuTTY you can connect to your server via: Raw,Telnet,Rlogin,FTP(SFTP),SSH1,SSH2. In addition to supporting all these protocols you can find more TOOLS:
- Puttygen – generator Rsa / Dsa keys used for authentication.
- Pagent – authentication agent helps to store the keys in memory.
- Plink – command line interface.
- Pscp – utility that provides safe files copying.
- Psftp – secure ftp-client for copying, viewing, renaming files…
Despite all these functionality, working with SecureCRT is more comfortable for one useful option which is using the tabs for different sessions. If you are working on five servers or even more for example with putty you will find some difficulties in switching between them, but to handle this French group released PuTTY Connection Manager. PuTTY Connection Manager is free PuTTY Client Add-on for Windows platforms which goal is to provide a solution for managing multiple PuTTY instances. So PuTTY Connection Manager will only combine the open windows in a user-friendly interface, and also provides an advanced interface for the connection settings.
Well to implement the server side SSH you can use the standard OpenSSH it is by default installed on any UNIX distribution for other system you can setup DropBear. It is an opensource software useful for “embedded”-type Linux (or other Unix) systems, such as wireless routers. For Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and 7 you can use WinSSHD or MobaSSH and all that you need is to press install button and the system will immediately adds the new service.
MobaSSH is basically an OpenSSH that is compiled with Cygwin. And you will have a number of useful commands:
- MobaHwInfo: provides information about the OS and Hardware.
- MobaSwInfo: list the software installed on the system
- MobaTaskList, MobaKillTask: a list the processes running on the system and kill the desired processes.
- TCPCapture: Monitor the Network
- Scp, sftp: transmit data in an Encrypted form over ssh-connection
- Rsync, wget: synchronizing local folders to network resources.
If we are talking about SSH we cannot miss the secure file transfer, when you connect to server via SSH client can perform all basic operations: upload file to the server, rename files and folders, change files properties, and create links and shortcuts. One of the most famous utility here on windows is WinSCP.
Now it is very important to keep your system up to date and mitigate the risk but there is a very important thing to do is to protect your system against brute force attack. Authorization using login and password considered not secure so in most cases it is recommended to disable it on server. But if we really need it you should implement intrusion prevention system. For example Sshguard.Sshguard will help to monitor logs, detect attacks and block the attacker with a firewall rule. the logs are collected from (syslog, syslog-ng, metalog, multilog, raw) and it calculate the suspicious activity such as passwords guessing attempts and block IP addresses by using the local packet filtering (pf, ipfw, netfilter / iptables, or hosts.allow file). There is also some similar projects such as Fail2ban and Sshdfilter 1.5.5.
Finally for mobile devices SSH client you can use the following:
- Symbian: PuTTY for Symbian OS
- Windows Mobile: PocketPuTTY
- Java: MidpSSH
- iPhone: iSSH
And for SSH Brute force you can use the following:
- SSH Brute Forcer
- SSHatter
- SSH BruteForcer
- THC Hydra
As you can see it is possible to do your tasks in a fast and secure way regardless the environment implemented using Secure Shell.
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TrueCrypt 6.3 Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in Encryption, Software Security, Tools on October 23, 2009
TrueCrypt one of the popular tools for encrypting and hiding partition under Linux, MacOS and Windows system has released a new version.
The new features at this release include:
• Full support for Windows 7.
• Full support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
• The ability to configure selected volumes.
TrueCrypt is an open-source, multi-platform application that allows you to create secure, encrypted folders for your data.
It is always recommended to use Truecrypt instead of other built in encryption system because it can hide your volumes and make it impossible for anyone to note the file existing on the HD, plus it provides a flexible way to choose encryption algorithms.
With TruCrypt your data remains encrypted until you need it.More details about the release can be found Here.
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Your Privacy in Danger!
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News on July 23, 2009
This is a really nice report that sky news have made about the computer repairing shops, well if you are going to fix your computer at a third party shop, take off your hard disk and try as much as possible to properly encrypt any sensitive information on it.
It’s very important to provide awareness activity to all your family and corporate staff.
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Majority of IT businesses see security breaches
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News on July 10, 2009
The number of security breaches seen by companies during the last 12 months has risen, a new survey has shown.
A study by the PGP Corporation showed that 70 per cent of IT businesses have been affected by at least one data breach security incident during the last year, a figure up from the 60 per cent seen in the previous corresponding period.
Additionally, 12 per cent of companies reported more than five data loss incidents, a figure up by three per cent.
The study showed that less than half of these breaches were publicly announced.
Phillip Dunkelberger, president and chief executive officer at PGP Corporation, said: ‘It’s clear that UK organisations recognise the need to protect customer information and other valuable data assets, but while their intentions may be good, not all of them are doing everything it takes to make this a reality.’
Further findings from the study showed that more than half of respondents are using an encryption process to secure their IT services from breaches.
[Source: BCS]
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Unlocking encryption myths
Posted by Mourad Ben Lakhoua in News on April 13, 2009
There’s no debate over the fact that data breaches are sharply on the rise. In mid-March the chief enterprise risk officer for Visa, Ellen Richey, said that common sense dictates that a challenging economy will produce increased data theft activity – sales of stolen data remains an exceptionally vibrant business despite the downturn. Richey added that: ‘security and law enforcement experts have confirmed that cyber attacks on consumers and businesses have intensified in recent months.’
According to the Identity Theft Resource Centre’s 2008 breach report, which only tracks incidents involving personally identifiable data, there were 656 reported breaches at the end of 2008, an increase of 47 per cent over the 2007 total of 446. And we’re off to a rather distressing start in 2009, with 125 breaches reported in the first three months of the year, affecting 1,553,069 records, according to the Open Security Foundation (www.datalossdb.org).
What is more depressing is that the Identity Theft Resource Centre reports that only 2.4 per cent of the companies involved in reported breaches utilized encryption. The vast majority of the exposed data was open to attack, a sad fact that no doubt delighted data thieves and enabled them to profit from the purloined data.
Criminals are so pleased by the discovery of unencrypted data that they are now deliberately targeting small and midsize business, according to information presented at the Visa Security Summit 2009, under the assumption that big business will have already done the right thing and have encrypted data throughout its lifecycle.
you can find more On The British Computer Society’s website
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