Category: Security HowTo’s

Getting a transparent proxy up and running can be troublesome especially getting it to terminate the HTTPS (TLS) connection, inspect it (if need be) and re-terminate it. Most businesses these days don’t want to actually inspect the traffic but can’t go without some-kind of internet monitoring so a minimalistic transparent

This article is a short walk-through demonstrating the process of installing and configuring mod_security on Apache. In this tutorial, we’ll be using CentOS 7. We’re starting with a pre-configured and running web server running httpd listening on port 80 and 443. There’s no other services such as Varnishor Nginx running.

This article shows the Jason for a custom IAM policy to allow snapshots with the minimum required access. I bet it can be improved upon but this is pretty close. { “Version”: “2012-10-17”, “Statement”: [ { “Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [ “ec2:CreateSnapshot”, “ec2:DeleteSnapshot”, “ec2:Describe*”, “ec2:CreateTags” ], “Resource”: “*” } ] }

This article shows how firewalld priorities rules and zones. The priority of zones is in alphabetical order. So the “block” zone is checked before the “dmz” done. And within a zone, the rules are applied in the order they were added. As we know, rules are in the order they

This article notes the AWS EC2 Security Group that should be associated with an EC2 to permit a roaming VPN client to connect to an IPSec/L2TP hosted on a server within AWS. * TIP: The AH and ESP are entered in as just numbers, not the “AH” and “ESP”.

This article is a quick note on how to improve OpenSSH server security on Redhat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 6 and 7. This is not about Passwords-v-Keys (use keys, not passwords) but rather hashes, encryption and key exchanges. The “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” file should have the following added to it to ensure

High-end firewall appliances such as those from Watchguard offer the facility to automatically block remote systems based on their behavior such as port scanning. An intruder will often start their intrusion with some reconnaissance which includes scanning the remote system for open ports to learn what services are available. pfSense

This article explains how to install OpenVAS on CentOS 7. My earlier attempts to document the installation process of OpenVAS on CentOS 6 failed. OpenVAS is an alternative to (and a fork of) the very popular Nessus. It’s a very capable vulnerability scanner. I hope to write other articles on

This article demonstrates how to restrict SSH access to only specified users and/or groups. You can do the reverse by allowing all but a few users to SSH into the server but we’ll focus on allowing only those we specify. Open the file “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” and look for (or create if