The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old — Don Massenzio’s Blog

Originally posted on portobellobookblog: There seems to have been a few books about irascible old men recently, including the wonderful ‘A Man Called Ove’ of course and ‘The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared’. Could Hendrik Groen be another one of these grumpy but lovable characters? Well yes he is: I…

via The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old — Don Massenzio’s Blog

What’s Different About Kali Linux?

What’s Different About Kali Linux?

Kali Linux is specifically geared to meet the requirements of professional penetration testing and security auditing. To achieve this, several core changes have been implemented in Kali Linux which reflect these needs:

  1. Single user, root access by design: Due to the nature of security audits, Kali Linux is designed to be used in a “single, root user” scenario. Many of the tools used in penetration testing require escalated privileges, and while it’s generally sound policy to only enable root privileges when necessary, in the use cases that Kali Linux is aimed at, this approach would be a burden.
  2. Network services disabled by default: Kali Linux contains sysvinit hooks whichdisable network services by default. These hooks allow us to install various services on Kali Linux, while ensuring that our distribution remains secure by default, no matter what packages are installed. Additional services such as Bluetooth are also blacklisted by default.
  3. Custom Linux kernel: Kali Linux uses an upstream kernel, patched for wireless injection.
  4. A minimal and trusted set of repositories: given the aims and goals of Kali Linux, maintaining the integrity of the system as a whole is absolutely key. With that goal in mind, the set of upstream software sources which Kali uses is kept to an absolute minimum. Many new Kali users are tempted to add additional repositories to theirsources.list, but doing so runs a very serious risk of breaking your Kali Linux installation.

Is Kali Linux Right For You?

As the distribution’s developers, you might expect us to recommend that everyone should be using Kali Linux. The fact of the matter is, however, that Kali is a Linux distribution specifically geared towards professional penetration testers and security specialists, and given its unique nature, it is NOT a recommended distribution if you’re unfamiliar with Linux or are looking for a general-purpose Linux desktop distribution for development, web design, gaming, etc.

Even for experienced Linux users, Kali can pose some challenges. Although Kali is an open source project, it’s not a wide-open source project, for reasons of security. The development team is small and trusted, packages in the repositories are signed both by the individual committer and the team, and — importantly — the set of upstream repositories from which updates and new packages are drawn is very small. Adding repositories to your software sources which have not been tested by the Kali Linux development team is a good way to cause problems on your system.

While Kali Linux is architected to be highly customizable, don’t expect to be able to add random unrelated packages and repositories that are “out of band” of the regular Kali software sources and have it Just Work. In particular, there is absolutely no support whatsoever for the apt-add-repository command, LaunchPad, or PPAs. Trying to install Steam on your Kali Linux desktop is an experiment that will not end well. Even getting a package as mainstream as NodeJS onto a Kali Linux installation can take a little extra effort and tinkering.

If you are unfamiliar with Linux generally, if you do not have at least a basic level of competence in administering a system, if you are looking for a Linux distribution to use as a learning tool to get to know your way around Linux, or if you want a distro that you can use as a general purpose desktop installation, Kali Linux is probably not what you are looking for.

In addition, misuse of security and penetration testing tools within a network, particularly without specific authorization, may cause irreparable damage and result in significant consequences, personal and/or legal. “Not understanding what you were doing” is not going to work as an excuse.

However, if you’re a professional penetration tester or are studying penetration testing with a goal of becoming a certified professional, there’s no better toolkit — at any price — than Kali Linux.

What is Kali Linux ?

Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. Kali contains several hundred tools aimed at various information security tasks, such as  Penetration Testing, Forensics and Reverse Engineering. Kali Linux is developed, funded and maintained by Offensive Security, a leading information security training company.

Kali Linux was released on the 13th March, 2013 as a complete, top-to-bottom rebuild ofBackTrack Linux, adhering completely to Debian development standards.

  • More than 600 penetration testing tools included: After reviewing every tool that was included in BackTrack, we eliminated a great number of tools that either simply did not work or which duplicated other tools that provided the same or similar functionality. Details on what’s included are on the Kali Tools site.
  • Free (as in beer) and always will be: Kali Linux, like BackTrack, is completely free of charge and always will be. You will never, ever have to pay for Kali Linux.
  • Open source Git tree: We are committed to the open source development model and our development tree is available for all to see. All of the source code which goes into Kali Linux is available for anyone who wants to tweak or rebuild packages to suit their specific needs.
  • FHS compliant: Kali adheres to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, allowing Linux users to easily locate binaries, support files, libraries, etc.
  • Wide-ranging wireless device support: A regular sticking point with Linux distributions has been supported for wireless interfaces. We have built Kali Linux to support as many wireless devices as we possibly can, allowing it to run properly on a wide variety of hardware and making it compatible with numerous USB and other wireless devices.
  • Custom kernel, patched for injection: As penetration testers, the development team often needs to do wireless assessments, so our kernel has the latest injection patches included.
  • Developed in a secure environment: The Kali Linux team is made up of a small group of individuals who are the only ones trusted to commit packages and interact with the repositories, all of which is done using multiple secure protocols.
  • GPG signed packages and repositories: Every package in Kali Linux is signed by each individual developer who built and committed it, and the repositories subsequently sign the packages as well.
  • Multi-language support: Although penetration tools tend to be written in English, we have ensured that Kali includes true multilingual support, allowing more users to operate in their native language and locate the tools they need for the job.
  • Completely customizable: We thoroughly understand that not everyone will agree with our design decisions, so we have made it as easy as possible for our more adventurous users to customize Kali Linux to their liking, all the way down to the kernel.
  • ARMEL and ARMHF support: Since ARM-based single-board systems like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black, among others, are becoming more and more prevalent and inexpensive, we knew that Kali’s ARM support would need to be as robust as we could manage, with fully working installations for both ARMEL and ARMHFsystems. Kali Linux is available on a wide range of ARM devices and has ARM repositories integrated with the mainline distribution so tools for ARM are updated in conjunction with the rest of the distribution.

Kali Linux is specifically tailored to the needs of penetration testing professionals, and therefore all documentation on this site assumes prior knowledge of, and familiarity with, the Linux operating system in general. Please see Should I Use Kali Linux? for more details on what make Kali unique.

Malware Infected All Eddie Bauer Stores in U.S., Canada

Clothing store chain Eddie Bauer said today it has detected and removed malicious software from point-of-sale systems at all of its 350+ stores in North America, and that credit and debit cards used at those stores during the first six months of 2016 may have been compromised in the breach. The acknowledgement comes nearly six weeks after KrebsOnSecurity first notified the clothier about a possible intrusion at stores nationwide.

ebstoreOn July 5, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity reached out to Bellevue, Wash., based Eddie Bauer after hearing from several sources who work in fighting fraud at U.S. financial institutions. All of those sources said they’d identified a pattern of fraud on customer cards that had just one thing in common: They were all recently used at some of Eddie Bauer’s 350+ locations in the U.S. The sources said the fraud appeared to stretch back to at least January 2016.

A spokesperson for Eddie Bauer at the time said the company was grateful for the outreach but that it hadn’t heard any fraud complaints from banks or from the credit card associations.

Earlier today, however, an outside public relations firm circled back on behalf of Eddie Bauer. That person told me Eddie Bauer — working with the FBI and an outside computer forensics firm — had detected and removed card-stealing malware from cash registers at all of its locations in the United States and Canada.

The retailer says it believes the malware was capable of capturing credit and debit card numbers from customer transactions made at all 350 Eddie Bauer stores in the United States and Canada between January 2, 2016 to July 17, 2016. The company emphasized that this breach did not impact purchases made at the company’s online store eddiebauer.com.

“While not all transactions during this period were affected, out of an abundance of caution, Eddie Bauer is offering identity protection services to all customers who made purchases or returns during this period,” the company said in a press release issued directly after the markets closed in the U.S. today.

Given the volume of point-0f-sale malware attacks on retailers and hospitality firms in recent months, it would be nice if each one of these breach disclosures didn’t look and sound exactly the same. For example, in addition to offering customers the predictable and irrelevant credit monitoring services topped with bland assurances that the “security of our customers’ information is a top priority,” breached entities could offer the cyber defenders of the world just a few details about the attack tools and online staging grounds the intruders used.

That way, other companies could use the information to find out if they are similarly victimized and to stop the bleeding of customer card data as quickly as possible. Eddie Bauer’s spokespeople say the company has no intention of publishing these so-called “indicators of compromise,” but emphasized that Eddie Bauer worked closely with the FBI and outside security experts.

For more on the importance of IOCs in helping to detect and ultimately stymie cybercrime, check out last Saturday’s story about IOCs released by Visa in connection with the recent intrusion at Oracle’s MICROS point-of-sale unit. And for the record, I have no information connecting this breach or any other recent POS malware attack with the breach at Oracle’s MICROS unit. If that changes, hopefully you’ll read about it here first

Living With a World on Fire: A Reading List — Longreads Blog

Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston. * * * As a teenager growing up in Southern California, I remember looking up one day and seeing a fine white powder falling from the sky. It was the middle of summer, and for […]

via Living With a World on Fire: A Reading List — Longreads Blog

Book Reivew- I am the Weapon — Don Massenzio’s Blog

Originally posted on Keystroke Blog: ? I am the Weapon by Allen Zadoff Published by Little Brown on May 13, 2014 Genres: Young Adult, Thriller, Mystery, Action, Adventure Pages: 368 Goodreads Amazon They needed the perfect assassin. Boy Nobody is the perennial new kid in school, the one few notice and nobody thinks much about.…

via Book Reivew- I am the Weapon — Don Massenzio’s Blog