Archive for month: May, 2018

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Internet Safety Tips for Kids & Teens

Internet Safety Tips for Kids & Teens

  • Personal Information. Don’t give out personal information without your parents’ permission. This means you should not share your last name, home address, school name, or telephone number. Remember, just because someone asks for information about you does not mean you have to tell them anything about yourself!
  • Screen Name. When creating your screen name, do not include personal information like your last name or date of birth.
  • Passwords. Don’t share your password with anyone but your parents. When you use a public computer make sure you logout of the accounts you’ve accessed before leaving the terminal.
  • Photos. Don’t post photos or videos online without getting your parents’ permission.
  • Online Friends. Don’t agree to meet an online friend unless you have your parents’ permission. Unfortunately, sometimes people pretend to be people they aren’t. Remember that not everything you read online is true.
  • Online Ads. Don’t buy anything online without talking to your parents first. Some ads may try to trick you by offering free things or telling you that you have won something as a way of collecting your personal information.
  • Downloading. Talk to your parents before you open an email attachment or download software. Attachments sometimes contain viruses. Never open an attachment from someone you don’t know.
  • Bullying. Don’t send or respond to mean or insulting messages. Tell your parents if you receive one. If something happens online that makes you feel uncomfortable, talk to your parents or to a teacher at school.
  • Social Networking. Many social networking websites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Second Life and MySpace) and blog hosting websites have minimum age requirements to signup. These requirements are there to protect you!
  • Research. Talk to your librarian, teacher or parent about safe and accurate websites for research. The public library offers lots of resources. If you use online information in a school project make sure you explain where you got the information.

For more tips, please see the following: https://securityorb.com/is4k/

Openvas 9 on Ubuntu Setup

Sysadmin Ramblings

Basic Installation

  •  Install Ubuntu 16.04LTS

Make sure you update your newly installed system with the latest patches – security updates.

  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get upgrade
  • sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Openvas9 is available as a package for Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 16.04.

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mrazavi/openvas
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install openvas9

Follow the prompts and answer yes for redis-server install.
Once installed,  run updates on the NVT to ensure you have the latest vulnerability tests.

  • sudo greenbone-nvt-sync
  • sudo greenbone-scapdata-sync
  • sudo greenbone-certdata-sync

The commands above may take a few minutes to run.  Once complete restart the openvas services to ensure they use the updated tests.

  • sudo /etc/init.d/openvas-manager restart
  • sudo /etc/init.d/openvas-scanner restart

There are additional components required to fully utilise openvas,  the best way to find out what is required is to download and use the openvas check tool.  It can be downloaded here.  Once downloaded run the application

  • ./openvas-check-setup –v9

Once everything has been setup and you now have a fully functioning setup ,you can access the openvas server from your preferred brower @   

  • https://host-ip-address:4000

The default username/password is admin / admin however if the password is somehow set or you need to change the admin password to something more secure (preferable),  use the following command to do so.

  • sudo openvasmd –new-password=my_secure_password –user=admin

In order to run scans and properly identify vulnerabilities on your hosts / networks ,  its best to first setup the necessary credentials.  Go to configuration -> credentails. Click on the star in the top left hand corner to create a new credential.  You will need to setup Windows/SMB as well as Linux credentials for the different hosts within your organization.  Regarding SMB users ive had success with and without the domain name in the username field.

Openvas – SSH Strong Ciphers 

Its best practice to harden your ssh servers and this includes using strong ciphers.  The documentation regarding openvas and strong ciphers or lack thereof threw me for a bit. I couldnt find anything that clearly identified the problem or assisted me in being able to run authenticated tests,  so hopefully this will help you.

Whenever my authenticated checks failed,  I noticed the following errors in my openvassd.messages file. “Failed to set SSH key type ‘ssh-ed25519‘”.
If you view /var/lib/openvas/plugins/ssh_fund.inc it indicates that for ed25519 you need to upgrade to libssh greater than 0.7.

Ubuntu 16.04 uses libssh0.6.3 , to successfully logon to ssh servers using secure ciphers it requires libssh0.7 and greater.  There is a ppa available that upgrades to a later version of libssh, but unfortunately this didnt work for me.  I needed to manually upgrade libssh,  below is the steps i followed.

You need to ensure your system has git,cmake and a few other packages installed.

  • sudo apt-get install git
  • sudo apt-get install build-essential
  • sudo apt-get install cmake
  • sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
  • sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Next install libssh

  • git clone git://git.libssh.org/projects/libssh.git libssh
  • cd libssh
  • mkdir build
  • cd build
  • cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
  • make
  • sudo make install

Link the default installed libssh binaries  to the new installed ones

  • cd  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
  • rm libssh.so.4
  • rm libssh_threads.so.4
  • ln -s /usr/lib/libssh.so.4 libssh.so.4
  • ln -s /usr/lib/libssh_threads.so.4 libssh_threads.so.4

Restart openvas scanner to ensure it uses the new binaries

  • /etc/init.d/openvas-scanner restart

Update OpenVAS Plugins (NVT, Cert Data & SCAP Data) Automatically

Once you have install OpenVAS it is a good idea to ensure it is kept up to date and running the latest security scripts to find the latest vulnerabilities as well as sync to the most updated nvt, scap and cert data.  The best way to do this is to create a script that sync’s the necessary data for you automatically each day.

Create a script under /usr/local/bin called update-openvas

  • vi /usr/local/bin/update-openvas

add the following contents to the file

  • /usr/sbin/greenbone-nvt-sync
  • /usr/sbin/greenbone-certdata-sync
  • /usr/sbin/greenbone-scapdata-sync
  • /usr/sbin/openvasmd –update –verbose –progress
  • /etc/init.d/openvas-manager restart
  • /etc/init.d/openvas-scanner restart

save the file and make it executeable

  • chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/update-openvas

run the script to make sure it works and that there are no errors

  • /usr/local/bin/update-openvas

add the script to cron to run daily

  • crontab -e

add the following contents

  • 1 1 * * * /usr/local/bin/update-openvas 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null

the above cronjob will be run at 1 minute past 1 every day