There are three types of web: the surface web, the deep web, and the dark web. All that you can access using your Google browser is known as the surface web - it is visible to one and all. The deep web is all information that is under lock and key. In other words, we don’t have access to it. The d…

Malware, where aren’t thou found? Well, even our wonderful Ubuntu can be infected. So what can we do about it? Hope and pray we keep our system safe and better yet, audit our systems regularly for malwares and rootkits. There are 4 system auditors for Ubuntu that we will review - lynis, rkhunter, c…

In SSH tunneling, an encrypted channel is created between an ssh client and an ssh server. Information flowing within the encrypted tunnel is secure and thus cannot be intercepted. This type of service is in particular used when running insecure protocols such as TightVNC. They can also be used to…

All passwords in all databases are stored as hashes. Even on a Windows machine, when you set your password, the system doesn’t store the password in plain text – it doesn’t keep it in a readable format. It is instead passed through a hashing algorithm that turns the plain text password into a hash. The h…

Brute forcing is an essential part of hacking – it is the last resort, it offers hope and sometimes, it just works! Have you ever wanted to code a small script that would bruteforce email servers for you? It is imperative to remember that our brute forcing efforts are only as great as our password l…

Passwords are stored as hashes and as such even if a hacker breaks into and steals a database, every password will be in the form of a hash, which is not reversible. Hashes may not be reversed, but they definitely can be brute forced! Hashes can be brute forced using packages on GitHub like the…

Until recently, I was content using the Uncomplicated Firewall that comes built-into Ubuntu. And it's called uncomplicated for a reason: its complicated counterpart – the iptables. It's not to say that iptables are difficult to comprehend or even impossible to use, but is rather massive. In other w…

All computer systems can suffer from malware and viruses, including Linux. Thankfully, very few viruses exist for Linux, so users typically do not install antivirus software. It is still recommended that Linux users have antivirus software installed on Linux systems that are on a network or that…