c0d3 :: j0rg3

Happy new year! New year means new servers, right?

That provides its own set of interesting circumstances!

The server we’re investigating in this scenario was chosen for being a dedicated box in a country that has quite tight privacy laws. And it was a great deal offered on LEB.

So herein is the fascinating bit. The rig took a few days for the provider to set up and, upon completion, the password for SSHing into the root account was emailed out. (o_0)

In very security-minded considerations, that means that there was a window of opportunity for bad guys to work on guessing the password before its owner even tuned in. That window remains open until the server is better secured. Luckily, there was a nice interface for reinstalling the OS permitting its purchaser to select a password.

My preferred approach was to script the basic lock-down so that we can reinstall the base OS and immediately start closing gaps.

In order:

In this post, we’re focused on the first two steps.

The tasks to be handled are:

We’ll use ssh-keygen to generate a key — and stick with RSA for ease. If you’d prefer ECC then you’re probably reading the wrong blog but feel encouraged to contact me privately.

The code:

We just run this script soon as the OS is reinstalled and we’re substantially safer. As a Deb8 install, quickly pulling down fail2ban and PortSentry makes things quite a lot tighter.

In another post, we’ll visit the 2017 version of making a DIY script to batten the hatches using a variety of publicly provided blocklists.

Download here:
    ssh_quick_fix.sh

In an effort to promote practical privacy measures, when I send people links to search engines, I choose ixquick. However, my personal settings submit my search terms via POST data rather than GET, meaning that the search terms aren’t in the URL.

Recently, I’ve found myself hand-crafting links for people and then I paste the link into a new tab, to make sure I didn’t fat-finger anything. Not a problem per se, but the technique leaves room for a bit more efficiency. So I’ve taken the ‘A Search Box on Your Website’ tool offered by ixquick and slightly modified the code it offers, to use GET variables, in a new tab where I can then copy the URL and provide the link to others.

You can test, or use, it here — I may add it (or a variant that just provides you the link) to the navigation bar above. First, though, I’m going to mention the need to the outstanding minds at ixquick because it would make a LOT more sense on their page than on mine.

In this writer’s opinion, it is vitally important that we take reasonable measures now to help insure anonymity, lest we create a situation where privacy no longer exists, and the simple want of, becomes suspicious.

Here’s how to configure your browser to automatically use a search engine that respects your privacy.

Chrome:

1. Click Settings.
2. Click “Set pages” in the “On startup” section.
3. Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Add a new page” text field.
4. Click OK.
5. Click “Manage search engines…”
6. At the bottom of the “Search Engines” dialog, click in the “Add a new search engine” field.
7. Enter
   ixquick
ixquick.com
https://ixquick.com/do/search?lui=english&language=english&cat=web&query=%s
8. Click “Make Default”.
9. Click “Done”.

Firefox:

1. Click the Tools Menu.
2. Click Options.
3. Click the General tab.
4. In “When Firefox Starts” dropdown, select “Show my home page”.
5. Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Home Page” text field.
6. Click one of the English options here.
7. Check box for “Start using it right away.”
8. Click “Add”.

Opera:

1. Click “Manage Search Engines
2. Click “Add”
3. Enter
   Name: ixquick
   Keyword: x
   Address: https://ixquick.com/do/search?lui=english&language=english&cat=web&query=%s
4. Check “Use as default search engine”
5. Click “OK”

Internet Explorer:

  _     ___  _ __        ___   _ _____ ___ 
 | |   / _ \| |\ \      / / | | |_   _|__ \
 | |  | | | | | \ \ /\ / /| | | | | |   / /
 | |__| |_| | |__\ V  V / | |_| | | |  |_| 
 |_____\___/|_____\_/\_/   \___/  |_|  (_) 

(This is not a good strategy for privacy.)

Congratulations!

You are now one step closer to not having every motion on the Internet recorded.

This is a relatively small measure, though. You can improve your resistance to prying eyes (e.g., browser fingerprinting) by using the Torbrowser Bundle, or even better, Tails, and routing your web usage through Tor, i2p, or FreeNet.

If you would like more on subjects like anonymyzing, privacy and security then drop me a line via email or Bitmessage me: BM-2D9tDkYEJSTnEkGDKf7xYA5rUj2ihETxVR

Working on remote servers, some tools are practically ubiquitous — while others are harder to come by. Even if you’ve the authority to install your preferred tools on every server you visit, it’s not always something you want to do. If you’ve hopped on to a friend’s server just to troubleshoot a problem, there is little reason to install tools that your friend is not in the habit of using. Some servers, for security reasons, are very tightly locked down to include only a core set of tools, to complicate the job of any prying intruders. Or perhaps it is a machine that you normally use through a graphical interface but on this occasion you need to work from the CLI.

These are very compelling reasons to get comfortable, at the very least, with tools like Vim, mail, grep and sed. Eventually, you’re likely to encounter a situation where only the classic tools are available. If you aren’t competent with those tools, you’ll end up facing the obstacle of how to get files from the server to your local environment where you can work and, subsequently, how to get the files back when you’re done. In a secured environment, this may not be possible without violating protocols.

Let’s take a look at how we can build a makeshift system monitor using some common tools. This particular configuration is for a server running PHP, MySQL and has the tools Htop and mytop installed. These can easily be replaced with top and a small script to SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST, if needed. The point here is illustrative, to provide a template to be modified according to each specific environment.

(Note: I generally prefer tmux to Gnu Screen but screen is the tool more likely to be already installed, so we’ll use it for this example.)

We’re going to make a set of windows, by a configuration file, to help us keep tabs on what is happening in this system. In so doing, we’ll be using the well-known tools less and watch. More specifically, less +F which tells less to “scroll forward”. Other words, less will continue to read the file making sure any new lines are added to the display. You can exit this mode with CTRL+c, search the file (/), quit(q) or get back into scroll-forward mode with another uppercase F.

Using watch, we’ll include the “-d” flag which tells watch we want to highlight any changes (differences).

We will create a configuration file for screen by typing:

> vim monitor.screenrc

In the file, paste the following:

# Screen setup for system monitoring
# screen -c monitor.screenrc
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{=kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B}%Y-%m-%d %{W}%c %{g}]'

screen -t htop 0 htop
screen -t mem 1 watch -d "free -t -m"
screen -t mpstat 2 watch -d "mpstat -A"
screen -t iostat 3 watch -d "iostat"
screen -t w 4 watch -d "w"
screen -t messages 5 less +F /var/log/messages
screen -t warn 6 less +F /var/log/warn
screen -t database 7 less +F /srv/www/log/db_error
screen -t mytop 8 mytop
screen -t php 9 less +F /srv/www/log/php_error


(Note: -t sets the title, then the window number, followed by the command running in that window)

Save the file (:wq) or, if you’d prefer, you can grab a copy by right-clicking and saving this file.

Then we will execute screen using this configuration, as noted in the comment:

> screen -c monitor.screenrc

Then you can switch between windows using CTRL+a, n (next) or CTRL+a, p (previous).

I use this technique on my own computers, running in a TTY different from the one used by X. If the graphical interface should get flaky, I can simply switch to that TTY (e.g., CTRL+ALT+F5) to see what things are going on — and take corrective actions, if needed.

There may be times when you find your Git repository burdened with scads of untracked files left aside while twiddling, testing bug patches, or what-have-youse.

For the especially scatter-brained among us, these things can go unchecked until a day when the useful bits of a git status scroll off the screen due to utterly unimportant stuff. Well, hopefully unimportant.

But we’d better not just cleave away everything that we haven’t checked in. You wonder:
What if there’s something important in one of those files?

You are so right!

Let’s fix this!

Firstly, we want a solution that’s reproducible. Only want to invent this wheel once, right?

Let’s begin with the play-by-play:

Git, we want a list of what isn’t tracked: git ls-files -o --exclude-standard -z

We’ll back these files up in our home directory (~), using CPIO but we don’t want a poorly-named directory or finding anything will become its own obstacle. So we’ll take use the current date (date +%Y-%m-%d), directory (pwd) and branch we’re using (git branch) and we’ll twist all of it into a meaningful, but appropriate, directory name using sed. git ls-files -o --exclude-standard -z | cpio -pmdu ~/untracked-git-backup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.`pwd | sed 's,^\(.*/\)\?\([^/]*\),\2,'`.`git branch | grep "*" | sed "s/* //"`/

Ahhhh… Much better. Is there anything left out? Perhaps. What if we decide that moving these files away was a mistake? The kind of mistake that breaks something. If we realize right away, it’s easily-enough undone. But what if we break something and don’t notice for a week or two? It’d probably be best if we had an automated script to put things back the way they were. Let’s do that.

Simple enough. We’ll just take the opposite commands and echo them into a script to be used in case of emergency.

Create the restore script (restore.sh), to excuse faulty memory: echo "(cd ~/untracked-git-backup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.`pwd | sed 's,^\(.*/\)\?\([^/]*\),\2,'`.`git branch | grep "*" | sed "s/* //"`/; find . -type f \( ! -iname 'restore.sh' \) | cpio -pdm `pwd`)" > ~/untracked-git-backup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.`pwd | sed 's,^\(.*/\)\?\([^/]*\),\2,'`.`git branch | grep "*" | sed "s/* //"`/restore.sh

Make the restore script executable: chmod u+x ~/untracked-git-backup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.`pwd | sed 's,^\(.*/\)\?\([^/]*\),\2,'`.`git branch | grep "*" | sed "s/* //"`/restore.sh

Lastly, the magic, compressed into one line that will stop if any command does not report success: a='untracked-git-backup-'`date +%Y-%m-%d`.`pwd | sed 's,^\(.*/\)\?\([^/]*\),\2,'`.`git branch | grep "*" | sed "s/* //"`; git ls-files -o --exclude-standard -z | cpio -pmdu ~/$a/ && git clean -d -f && echo "(cd ~/$a/; find . -type f \( ! -iname 'restore.sh' \) | cpio -pdm `pwd`)" > ~/$a/restore.sh && chmod +x ~/$a/restore.sh; unset a