I am a huge fan of automation; I strongly believe that automation, machine learning and / or artificial intelligence (whatever these terms mean for different people) are our best chance to tackle one of the biggest problems we have in the cyber security industry: the human limitations.
Now that multi factor authentication is gaining ground I thought I would write a simple guide on how to secure administrative access with MFA on Linux systems. The solution is simple and based on Google Authenticator. The good thing with Google Authenticator is that it's a typical TOTP/HOTP solution and as such does not require any internet connectivity on either the server or the client. The configuration examples provided are more or less appropriate for openSUSE Leap 15 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
In September 2018 (ISC)2 announced a Free GDPR course for members. What started as a single free course was very recently rebranded as the Professional Development Institute. The plans are for up to 30 (!!) new courses in 2019.
GDPR is supposed to let us take back control of our private data. In reality though many websites either don't allow that to happen through their selection of cookies, or constantly present to us the same requests until we accept the most invasive option. At the same time there is a known security risk related to every day broswing: browser - served malware, sometimes caused or enabled by the insane amount of 3rd party uncontrolled scripts that are served to us on the websites we visit. We need to find ways to browse securely and protecting our privacy as much as possible.
As you may have heard, Google+ is going to die. This is a good thing since there were some security / privacy issues last year. Google decided to kill the product instead of trying to fix it, which is understandable and a respectful decision.
That was an interesting January!
Some history first: I started working full time when I finished my military service in 1994. Between 1994 and 1998 I had two simultaneous jobs. From 1998 up to 2000 I had one job and I was studying for my MSc part-time. Starting 2001 and up to 2007 I had again two jobs while from 2007 up to 2010 I had one full time job and was studying for my MBA (distance learning).