Those who don't follow Linux and open source closely may have missed the recent brouhaha in the Linux world -- or only caught the highlights which for the most part missed the mark. Now that the dust has settled a bit, and with hindsight in our favor, we thought the time might be ripe for a little retrospective.
At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, and Dirk Hohndel, VMware VP and chief open source officer, had a wide-ranging conversation about Linux security, open-source developer, and quantum computing.
Torvalds would really like his work to get back to being boring. It hasn't been lately because of Intel's CPU Meltdown and Spectre security bugs. The root cause behind these security holes was speculative execution.
Criminals behind a Mirai botnet have been spotted using an unusual technique: Leveraging an open-source project called Aboriginal Linux to create a compiled binary, with versions of the malware tailored to each targeted platform.
The malware authors are leveraging Aboriginal – a legitimate tool for cross-compilation – to make Mirai executable on a wide variety of internet of things (IoT) devices and platforms, including routers, IP cameras, connected devices and Android devices.
SUSE, the open source software company, has been sold to a Swedish private equity firm.
EQT Partners will acquire SUSE from current owners Micro Focus in a deal worth $2.5 billion USD and is expected to close in early 2019.
There are thousands of tools, utilities, and programs that come pre-installed on a Linux system. You can run them from a terminal window or virtual console as commands via a shell such as Bash.
You may think you're new to Linux, but you're really not. There are 3.74 billion global internet users, and all of them use Linux in some way since Linux servers power 90% of the internet. Most modern routers run Linux or Unix, and the TOP500 supercomputers also rely on Linux. If you own an Android smartphone, your operating system is constructed from the Linux kernel.
CTS Labs, a heretofore unknown Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup, has claimed it's found over a dozen security problems with AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, doesnt buy it.
Torvalds, in a Google+ discussion, wrote:
"When was the last time you saw a security advisory that was basically 'if you replace the BIOS or the CPU microcode with an evil version, you might have a security problem?' Yeah."
Did your screen just turn black or your laptop freeze without warning? Maybe your hard drive has started chirping. Worse yet, maybe you suddenly can’t save to your home partition.
All these signs of a corrupted or failing drive can cause you to sweat, but there’s no reason to immediately throw away your computer. Keep reading to learn about five Linux tools that can help you retrieve your data and get your digital life back on track.
The awesome operating system Linux is free and open source. As such, there are thousands of different ‘flavours’ available – and some types of Linux such as Ubuntu are generic and meant for many different uses.
But security-conscious users will be pleased to know that there are also a number of Linux distributions (distros) specifically designed for privacy. They can help to keep your data safe through encryption and operating in a ‘Live’ mode where no data is written to your hard drive in use.
A server being compromised or hacked for the purpose of this guide is an unauthorized person or bot logging into the server in order to use it for their own, usually negative ends.
Disclaimer: If your server has been compromised by a state organization like the NSA or a serious criminal group then you will not notice any problems and the following techniques will not register their presence.
