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posted by on Monday January 09 2017, @10:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the belt-and-[suspenders|braces] dept.

Red Hat employee Daniel J. Walsh writes via OpenSource.com

When I was young, Paul Simon released his hit song, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Inspired by this song, I've collected 50 ways sysadmins and laypeople can avoid getting hacked:

"Make a new plan, Stan"
[...]
6. Run applications in the SELinux Sandbox whenever possible--it was a container before containers were cool. Also follow the development of Flatpack, which soon should be developing sandboxing capabilities.

7. Don't install or use Flash. Firefox no longer supports it, and hopefully most web servers are moving away from it.
[...]
"Just get yourself free"
[...]
19. [...] I don't do online banking on my phone--only on my Linux computer.
[...]
"Hop on the bus, Gus"

21. Run Linux on your systems. When I first hooked my father up with a computer system, I barely got home before his system was infested with viruses. I returned and installed Linux on his system and he has been running it ever since.
[...]
"And get yourself free"
[...]
50. Set up a special guest network for all those Christmas IoT devices your kids receive. I love my Amazon Echo and automated lights and power switches ("Alexa, turn on the Christmas Lights"), but each one of these is a Linux operating system [whose manufacturer's configuration] has questionable security.

Do you take exception with anything he suggests. (Being a Red Hat guy, he is enthusiastic about systemd.) Can you think of something he missed?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday January 09 2017, @07:56PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday January 09 2017, @07:56PM (#451585) Journal

    I do not give a shit if my traffic to wunderground.com is logged.

    https not only protects from logging, it also protects from middlemen modifying content (this may even be your ISP) [infoworld.com].

    There's AFAICT no http-derived protocol that supports digital signing of cleartext (that is, the content is in the clear, but carries a cryptographic signature), therefore https is the only way to protect against such manipulation.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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