Savannah W-ITS

Some recent events illustrate current, seemingly innocuous examples of personal data collection. You don’t know or can’t imagine this being a problem – but it could be.   Examples:

Any commercial web site (where a product is being sold and data about your ‘web visit’ is being collected and maintained.)
Facebook privacy & security policies and practices.
Google Maps [...]

The GOOD news – using the GeoIP module (mod_geoip.c.) can be quite simple.  The module provides much more than simply a relatively easy means to manage web server access – it opens up some opportunities for data mining.
The BAD news – when limiting access make sure that this is what you really want/need to do [...]

Well, it happened to Google (and a number of other companies in late 2009, early 2010) – hackers reached deep? into the information trove. So, who cares?  This goes on constantly, yes?
We have been lulled by our penchant for convenience – it has to be ‘easy’ or we are reluctant to ‘go there’; this happens [...]

GEO Blocking network access – blocking specific IP blocks (GEO-blocking – do you really need those connections from Asia?)
CAVEAT: The flow of packets through your system is fairly complex – I am limiting this discussion and I encourage you to RTM as well as the tutorial referenced in below…
There are a number of approaches to [...]

Part 101b:  Some example rules for your Linux Firewall

Creating a custom chain
Creating a LOG rule
Creating a  DROP rule

Some basic/simple rules you should implement – blocking RFC 1918 (or similar) traffic at your gateway.
Your Internet Gateway is the connection between your internal network and the public Internet.  For many consumers and small businesses this is [...]

Part 101a: Where should you start with a Linux firewall?
Review your configuration (review ALL tables – save the short script below to the file /tmp/show.firewall – you must be ‘root’ or use ’sudo’)
#!/bin/bash
for TABLE in raw mangle nat filter
do
printf “\t##### Table: ${TABLE} ####\n”
iptables [...]