Linux for System Administrators

Hello again everyone! This month’s post is about an awesome book I just got my hands on related to the Linux operating system.  It’s authored by both Viorel Rudareanu & Daniil Baturin. And is published by Packt, who’s got a huge line of great books and content. I’ve decided to write up a quick review of the book for anyone that interested in learning Linux or increasing their Linux OS skills.

Book Link -> https://www.packtpub.com/product/linux-for-system-administrators/9781803247946

What will this book teach me?

This is a great book for anyone that is new to Linux and would like to further their skills. Yes, it’s also great for intermediate users, who are looking for Linux best practices, as well as advanced skills such as server virtualization and Linux system security.

CentOS 8 – Setting up a LAMP environment

Welcome back again to another Stealthbay blog. So this week I was trying to setup a LAMP (linux, apache, mariadb, php) setup to test out some web apps. And, I thought I’d post a quick tutorial on what I did to set one up. Hopefully, it helps someone else out there to setup one very quickly using CentOS 8.

Note – I was using CentOS 8 on VMWare 15.5 and noticed there is an issue. Make sure you do not power the machine on right away. Go to the hardware settings on the VM and remove the “autostart.inf” it shows up as a CD/DVD drive. This is the easy install option and it messes up the installation.

Automating NMAP Scans

Automating NMAP Scans

Why do I need automation ?

Security analysts just don’t have the time to always run manual tests. Let’s say I wanted to monitor my ports and services open on my external lab IP address. It is not feasible for me to run a scan at 3am every day for the rest of my life. Therefore, if I had a tool that could automatically run a scan, check to see if anything suspicious is found and can alert me if that is the case would be hugely beneficial. In my case, I have created a method to do this and it is a very simple and straight forward method that virtually any one can use!

How can I create a NMAP scanning server ?

Servers are pretty easy to put up whether it’s a Virtual Image that’s spun up on a bare box, desktop, or in the cloud. In my case a Linux Ubuntu Server was used. It has a firewall and is assigned an external public IP address. It then has the ability to scan my lab network public IP address to be able to identify any open ports/services. It’s a great way to gain some visibility into knowing if any new ports were opened that shouldn’t have been or were missed.

*WARNING* please be sure that the network you are scanning is your own, or that you have WRITTEN PERMISSION to scan the network you desire. Scanning networks where you have no written permission can lead to legal issues, so please be sure you have permission or ownership of a network before doing so.

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Research Project – Android Mobile Forensics

Mobile Devices

Today is more of a Throwback Thursday moment that I’d like to share with everyone regarding mobile devices.

So in 2015 in order to Graduate from the B.tech Forensics – Computer Crime program.
We had a year long research project that was conducted by each student.

My focus was on Mobile forensics and particularly on Android devices.

This was a field that was slightly newer to me, but I felt mobile security will play a huge role in the future. We use our mobile devices for just about everything, and this means future cyber attacks will start to hit mobile devices.

Also, at the same time, I was very curious as to what type of information mobile devices hold and contain about us. I hope my research brings out some answers for many people while at the same time posing further questions to explore.

I’ve decided to attach a PDF of my Android Forensics project.
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