Respecting Amavis' "Banned Extensions" setting

Posted on Sun 13 August 2017 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, Security, Linux, Mail

I've been dabbling a little bit with iRedMail, mostly just to have a play with a mail server, but also to see what's involved in mail security. iRedMail is a package that pulls together Postfix as an MTA, Dovecot as a POP3 & IMAP server, SOGo for ActiveSync, Roundcube for Webmail, SpamAssassin for spam protection, and ClamAV for virus scanning.

Okay I have no idea why I have to write this, but apparently it's a thing.

Amavis has a list of banned file extensions. In Debian, they live in /etc/amavis …


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Making Amavis work with ESET Antivirus

Posted on Sat 12 August 2017 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, Security, Linux, Mail

I've been dabbling a little bit with iRedMail, mostly just to have a play with a mail server, but also to see what's involved in mail security. iRedMail is a package that pulls together Postfix as an MTA, Dovecot as a POP3 & IMAP server, SOGo for ActiveSync, Roundcube for Webmail, SpamAssassin for spam protection, and ClamAV for virus scanning.

But of course, ClamAV has shown disappointing performance, and it would be really nice to use something more... commercially suitable.

To tie together mail receipt and scanning, iRedMail uses Amavis (strictly …


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RingZer0team CTF - Challenges 86, 87, and 88

Posted on Thu 13 July 2017 in Security • Tagged with Security, Tech, RingZer0Team

There are a bunch of fantastic Capture The Flag security challenges on RingZer0Team.com. I've been working through some of these for a wee while now, and with the New Zealand Cyber Security Challenge coming up again soon, I thought I'd get back into some of them.

Challenge 86 ("1/3 Do not waste the environment", under the Forsensic Challenges) is one of a series of challenges where you need to dig through some provided data to find the flag.

I started by downloading the 'forensic bundle', which was just …


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Staying Secure in Business

Posted on Wed 28 June 2017 in Security • Tagged with Security, Tech

A friend asked a question today on Facebook. I started writing a reply, and it turned into a 700-word essay. Hate it when that happens...

The question was:

"If large multi-international companies are getting hacked in Europe who have millions if not billions of $$ and capacity to protect their IT systems - how can small/micro businesses protect their IT platforms and systems?"

Firstly - nobody is safe from an APT ("Advanced Persistent Threat"). The recent NotPetya outbreak was an APT - malicious actors hacked a Ukrainian firm that produced accounting software, and …


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RingZer0team CTF - Challenge 44

Posted on Sat 24 June 2017 in Security • Tagged with Security, Tech, RingZer0Team

There are a bunch of fantastic Capture The Flag security challenges on RingZer0Team.com. I've been working through some of these for a wee while now, and with the New Zealand Cyber Security Challenge coming up again soon, I thought I'd get back into some of them.

Challenge 56 ("Hey Chuck where is the flag?", under the Forensic Challenges) started by only offering a .pcap file. I downloaded Wireshark and had a quick dig. The packet capture consisted of a brief browse of a "Chuck Norris Facts" website.

After quickly …


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RingZer0team CTF - Challenge 65

Posted on Sat 24 June 2017 in Security • Tagged with Security, Tech, RingZer0Team

This is a continuation of my series on RingZer0Team.com.

Challenge 65 ("Hide my ass in my home", under the Forensic challenges) is a nice quick little forensic challenge. You get to download a .tar file, and do a bit of digging to uncover the flag.

This was a nice easy few minutes. After downloading the archive, I discovered a few files inside - including a particularly groovy electronica swing track, which I'm listening to again right now. Yeaaaaahhhhh.

Apart from a groovy mp3, the archive contains some dot-files such as …


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WireGuard - Part Three (Troubleshooting)

Posted on Mon 12 June 2017 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, Security, WireGuard, Networking, Linux

This is part of my brief series on WireGuard. I'm pretty enamoured with WireGuard and the way it works, but there were a couple slightly curly bits that I needed to get my head around. This troubleshooting guide is a rough dump of the issues I had, and how I fixed them.

Gotten Stuck?

At this stage, there are actually a few ways that this can go wrong, even though we haven't done much. Think through all the bits:

  • Installed WireGuard at both ends
  • Set up your NAT rule on …

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WireGuard - Part Two (VPN routing)

Posted on Sun 11 June 2017 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, Security, WireGuard, Networking, Linux

This is a continuation of my brief series on the new WireGuard VPN. Part One was about the simple building-blocks to get WireGuard working between two endpoints. Now that we've got a couple machines able to ping each other by IP address, we can carry on a bit deeper into the inter-LAN routing stuff.

Extending on from the IP addresses in Part One, instead of JUST connecting to the remote machine, I want to actually have access to everything on the whole 10.20.0.0/16 network; even the …


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WireGuard - Part One (Installation)

Posted on Sat 03 June 2017 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, Security, WireGuard, Networking, Linux

WireGuard is the most excellent VPN stack around. It's really fast, the concept of Cryptokey Routing is awesome, and I love the speed and simplicity benefits that come from opionionated cryptography. The protocol is so simple - expressed in a mere 4k lines of code - that it's auditable by anyone.

But.

With my initial naive approach, I found myself using HTTPS, over ports forwarded over SSH tunnels, connected over WireGuard. Although it was straightforward to get WireGuard working between two endpoints, I ended up in nested-crypto hell.

So, this brief series …


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RingZer0team CTF - Linux Sysadmin challenges

Posted on Sun 28 May 2017 in Security • Tagged with Security, Tech, RingZer0Team

There are a bunch of fantastic Capture The Flag security challenges on RingZer0Team.com. I've been working through some of these for a wee while now, and with the New Zealand Cyber Security Challenge coming up again soon, I thought I'd get back into some of them.

The Sysadmin Linux series of challenges is where you're trying to breach the security of a Linux system. I actually finished most of these last year, but I wanted to finish my last two. Of course, to get to the last two stages …


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