Posts tagged Security
Open Source E-Mail Encryption
Dec 21st
“…Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?…” -Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP
PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don’t want “The Man” reading your e-mails, and neither do I.
There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.
If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.
If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.
“So ya ya ya, yackity smackity… where do I download this fantastic software?”
I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:
Enjoy!
Written by El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power
Open Source E-Mail Encryption
Aug 11th
“…Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?…”
-Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP
Of course it doesn’t, it simply means you value your privacy.
PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don’t want “The Man” reading your e-mails, and neither do I.
There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.
If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.
If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.
“So ya ya ya, yackity smackity… where do I download this fantastic software?”
I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:
Enjoy!
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo
FREE Full Hard Drive Encryption
Jul 18th
So there you are at Starbucks sipping on your latte, and surfing on their incredibly high priced wi-fi with your brand new Alienware laptop thinking to yourself, “Self! This is a mighty good latte!”.A few minutes later, you slip into a latte induced coma (Work
with me here.)
After about an hour or two you wake up with foam and cinnamon all over your face, and a splitting headache, but that isn’t the trouble. The trouble is that someone snatched your new Alienware laptop with all of your sensitive personal information (edit: a 24esque – mission impossible attempt in your stories to friends and family. We know how it goes. Que up the theme music).Stuff like bank information, passwords, etc! No biggie right? I mean you have a pretty good password.
Seriously, who is going to guess banana12 right?
With FREE software available on the internet, you can boot up to a CD and browse files, or even change the administrators password on your laptop. Then all of your sensitive information becomes their sensitive information which they will use to take you for everything you are worth (It’s called Identity Theft, look into it).
Well, the bad guys can’t get to your information if you take stronger precautions to secure your data. One of the best ways you can do that is with full hard drive encryption. And lucky for you, I have tested a FREE software that can do it.
CompuSec is a free security suite that among many other things, encrypts your hard drive (including the operating system) using a fast 256bit AES encryption. When the bad guys try to look at your files, all they see is a blank hard drive.Â
So lets go back to our scenario then, the bad guy got your laptop, but you encrypted it using CompuSec… The joke is on him! Actually, that isn’t true, he now has your $4000 Alienware laptop, but at least he doesn’t have your personal information and you won’t end up on Dateline’s “To Catch an ID Thief.”
Posted By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power
Can I Replace Telnet With Open SSH on Windows?
Feb 13th
For those of you out there still living in the dark ages, and still using Telnet on Windows because you haven’t found a more viable alternative (You know who you are) We have some good news for you!
Maybe you haven’t decided to switch to a more secure solution because you use Windows Servers and Windows hasn’t adopted using SSH.
Maybe you think SSH is only for Unix/Linux.
Well, your excuses are no longer good here sonny boy. If you haven’t heard there is an OpenSSH port for Windows. Now you can still use the terminal remote access method, but you won’t be sending your login credentials and important information across the wire in plain text.
OpenSSH provides full support for SSH/SCP/SFTP. So what are you waiting for? Download OpenSSH and secure your servers.
As we always say at Asktheadmin.com The Safer the better! If we don’t have to send our credentials as plain text, we are all for it. After all we do know how to use a SNIFFER!
From Their Website:
OpenSSH for Windows
OpenSSH for Windows is a free package that installs a minimal OpenSSH server and client utilities in the Cygwin package without needing the full Cygwin installation. This is similar to the package formerly available from NetworkSimplicity.
The OpenSSH for Windows package provides full SSH/SCP/SFTP support. SSH terminal support provides a familiar Windows Command prompt, while retaining Unix/Cygwin-style paths for SCP and SFTP.
Catch the download page here. [Via SourceForge]
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