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Using defence in depth to mitigate the risk of ransomware

I've written before about the evils of crypto locker and the spawn of that devilish state of affairs known as ransomware. Recently I came across an infection and saw first hand how defence in depth can save your data and the bitcoin. Firstly, let's consider the perimeter of the network. What vectors for attack exist externally to the network? There are many and they include: malicious emails dodgy websites with malicious payload  malicious actors (hackers) out to get you The first layers of defence include (in this case): an antivirus/antispam gateway for email, with the firewall at the main router allowing only connections on port 25 (smtp) from the mail scanner gateway antispyware/antivirus email on the computers scanning every website that a user visits, plus using OpenDNS with a variety of restrictions on it to protect the user from themselves firewalls and obfuscated ports where applicable with minimal "open-to-the-world" ports That's the ha

Samsung Gear Fit vs Apple Watch 2 - a review and comparison

Recently I was given an Apple Watch 2 - it's very nice and I've replaced my Samsung Gear Fit with it. After wearing the Watch for a week, there have been a few tangible differences between the two I thought it might be worth noting. If you're unfamiliar with the devices they look like this: These images are the same as the devices that I have. The physical differences are obvious - the Apple Watch is significantly bigger, with the more square face. Both have OLED displays which make for bright, colourful GUIs. Both are touch screen and both share a variety of internal sensors like heart rate and accelerometer. The Gear Fit is lighter, narrower and for what I've used it for - holds a longer charge than the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch has many more sensors - including GPS/GLONASS and WiFi, checks your heart rate with great frequency daily and keeps telling me to "Breathe"! (this gets a bit annoying after a while) Here are a few of the summary differenc

Mint 18.2 Review

Linux Mint 18.2 in the wild! I’ve just upgraded to Mint 18.2 from 18.1 being the (sort of) early adopter that I am. Realistically there was no good reason to do this - 18.1 was running well and doing everything I need, except to get any new bits and pieces that come with .2. There are some nice new desktop pics (quite beautiful ones actually), but not much I can see that is really different. It's still running Cinnamon, so there haven't been any gigantic changes in the UI in a while. I’m running it on a Lenovo M series desktop that I’ve had for some years and it’s a beast of a machine so any performance upticks in the new version aren’t really noticeable. Here are the release notes : http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3289 and they're worth a quick perusal. I did find that my desktop icons all disappeared. As a result I experienced sadness :-( Fortunately I found the solution. The nemo-desktop application is no longer running. I found it (/usr/bin/nemo.desktop), ran it and

pi-hole - awful name, great product!

Advertised as "A Black Hole for Internet Advertisements" pi-hole ( https://pi-hole.net/ ) goes a long way to living up to this reputation. What is it? pi-hole is a domain name server that can be installed with one command onto a Linux box or Raspberry Pi running Raspbian or similar. Once this is done, an update to your site's DNS records and all queries get pushed through the pi-hole, blocked as appropriate and then sent out to the world. We are running it on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS virtual server, with 1GB of RAM and a single vCPU - and the DNS response time is quite acceptable. A tiny server will run this software quite easily. Why use it? If I'm looking at websites and browsing around, typically I'm not just getting my content that I want - there's a bit more sneaking through. Ads! Most sites will use advertisements to make money and I have no problem with this. My issue usually stems from having too many of the damn things popping up and chewing up re

MacBook Pro (late 2016) first impressions

One of my clients who is a bit of an early adopter grabbed a new MacBook Pro (MBP) last week. It's the 15" i7 wizzbang bit of gear that looks really quite lovely. He asked me to migrate his data from his old MBP to the new one. I ran a full backup to external USB and it was all going swimmingly, and then I remembered - damn! The new MBP's don't have regular USB! They only have USB-C! Aaargh. Fortunately the Apple Migration tool is great and I was able to punch it all across via wireless (this is very slow - I recommend an alternative via ethernet) After using the machine for an hour or so this morning, this is what I've come up with: Pros: The screen is gorgeous - the Retina screen is just so lovely to look at and has such awesome colour depth. I really liked it. Flicking through some of the desktop images and pictures showed the resolution and colours beautifully. I reckon my next one has to have this the touch bar above the keyboard - I thought this wou

The unintentional DoS

DoS - Denial of Service Over the weekend it was very hot here - 39C over both days and air conditioning was being pushed pretty hard. My team and I had two unrelated, but linked situations evolve that could have hit us with a DoS. You see, we have a network attached storage device (NAS) that had a fan failure. While this NAS has redundant fans in it, one wasn't enough to keep the temperatures under the 55C warning threshold. So it started to complain.... Over the course of the 48 hour weekend, this NAS sent out over three and a half thousand emails! 3500+ emails! All to our logging email addresses, which then sent it out to the members of the team. 5 team members, 3500+ emails.... 17,500 emails being sent and received. That's a lot email in a short time. Most email servers will handle that and ours certainly did. Fortunately too we use G-Suite (Google Apps new fancy name) and so the volume of mail wasn't an issue. What became an issue though - and this did have an eff

3 Word Processors compared - Microsoft Word, Apple Pages and Google Docs

In the course of work and university I've been jumping a bit between Word, Pages and Docs for various reasons. I thought it might be useful to compare them. Let's start. Price Google Docs is included either in a free Gmail account or G-Suite. Its available for free on your mobile device with native apps on iOS and Android Pages is $30.99 and can be found in the Apple Store. It's included in iOS on the iPhone or iPad Word is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. The cheapest of which is Office365 Personal (for Mac) which is $89 inc GST per year (See the Microsoft Office pricing page here ). Includes a licence for a single mobile device On price Docs is the obvious winner. Free to get access to and solid support on mobile devices.  Usability All three of these applications are very useable - but which one is *most* usable? Google Docs is a clean, uncluttered interface with relatively few options available: Simple and uncluttered with everything there and

osTicket and OTRS - a comparison

While I have been a fan of OTRS for many years and like the interface, reporting and usability of it, I recently chanced across osTicket (from the TV series Mr Robot). It looked interesting and a client I have wants an internal ticket management system (they had also seen it). After a bit of to and fro, they agreed to some research time and I set up osTicket. My usual server OS is Ubuntu's latest LTS. In this case, 16.04LTS. The problem is, it ships with PHP7, and osTicket doesn't play nicely with that. There is a good tutorial over on Chubbable that's worth checking out: https://chubbable.com/osticket-install-guide/2#ubuntu-based Have a look at that if you want to install it - it's pretty straightforward. So my impression of osTicket is that its pretty good. The interface is reasonable intuitive and I've set it up at home to manage the stuff I'm going (but mostly just to play with it). There is a client interface and an agent interface. The Agent interfac

2017 - a new year and new challenges in IT ahead!

Welcome back. We've got a lot to do this year - the number of attacks is increasing again, Microsoft's new update policy will have it's full effect on the computing ecosystem and Linux will be a prominent part of this blog. Lots happening indeed.... We're at the 10th day of January and I've already had servers lose their Kerberos connectivity with active directory, our first cryptolocker infection and so much more.... I need a lot more coffee to deal with this pish. Stay tuned - I'm hoping to get my hands on some new tech and describe, some old tech and revive it, and just generally putter around for your amusement. So far I have learned this: MacBook Pro's (2012) can and do lose their wifi capability - I think the on-board adapter and finding one that works with a Mac can be tricky.  MacBook Air's have a battery problem - they turn off and won't turn back on until you remove the battery (an annoying exercise) Plus all the stuff on fixin