NSA Proof Your Cellular Phone Calls With RedPhone

 (Photo credit: HarrisonEarl) A lot of what I've been blogging about lately has been to do with covering your ass from illegal government snooping. One of the big bombshells that broke recently was that the Department of Justice has issued warrants to all of the major phone companies to obtain all phone records for everyone in the United States. Also, it has been reported on some news sites that the NSA is actively grabbing those phone conversations out of the air as well. So what is one to do about it? Well, last year I talked about setting up your own secure VoIP server, but if you don't want to go through that sort of headache, and you are an Android or an iPhone user there is another solution. You can use RedPhone. From their...

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Are Your Running Microsoft Windows? The NSA Has Backdoor Access

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) In a chilling, yet somehow unsurprising report I read on Monday it turns out that no matter how well you think you've locked down your Windows workstation or server, the NSA can still easily get into it. Why? Because Microsoft has been building backdoor's into their operating system since Windows 95. From WND: The National Security Agency has backdoor access to all Windows software since the release of Windows 95, according to informed sources, a development which follows the insistence by the agency and federal law enforcement for backdoor “keys” to any encryption, according to a report in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.  Having such “keys” is essential for the export of any encryption allowed under...

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Encrypt Your Linux Tarball Backups

(Photo credit: Wikipedia) Again with my anti-NSA server... This time I had to figure out how to back it up. Now Linode.com, where I am hosting it, does have a backup solution for an extra $100 per month... Um, no thanks. Normally for a Linux server I run a script to compress certain directories into a tarball, then I download them later to my backup server to write to tape. Since all my emails on my new email server are stored in an encrypted volume, I wanted to make sure that the files that were stored in the encrypted volume could be backed up in an encrypted tarball that I could download later. That way if someone were to seize my server, the encrypted volume wouldn't be mounted and the backup files would be encrypted as well. Well...

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Monitor Your Public Facing Servers For Free With UptimeRobot

Still on the kick of talking about my new anti-NSA email server, I wanted to tell you about monitoring it. I found a public service that lets me keep an eye on my email server 24/7 in five minute intervals all for free. It's called UptimeRobot. I used to use Monitor.us, but their free service only checks if your server is up every 30 minutes. A server could easily be rebooted during that time and you would never know. With UptimeRobot, it checks on whatever service you want every five minutes. Plus it can notify you in several ways including Email, SMS, RSS or Twitter. That is particularly handy if the thing you are monitoring is an email server like me, and you need an alternative way to be notified. The free version allows you to monitor...

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Actively Combat Hackers on Your Linux Server With Fail2Ban

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I've already mentioned that I have moved off of Google Apps for my email onto my own email server running on Linux using iRedmail. One of the components that comes with the iRedmail package is a really bad-ass utility that acts as a one application army for combating hackers who are trying to gain access to your Linux server. The tool is called Fail2Ban, and it works along side your iptables firewall by actively scanning your server's logs for suspicious activity, and automatically creating firewall rules to thwart the attacker. From their page: Fail2ban scans log files (e.g. /var/log/apache/error_log) and bans IPs that show the malicious signs -- too many password failures, seeking for exploits, etc. Generally...

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Encrypt The Sensitive Files On Your Linux VPS Using Truecrypt

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) NOTE: TrueCrypt is obsolete. I recommend using VeraCrypt for this setup instead. I like many people got upset when they heard the news about the NSA's PRISM program. It's one of the reasons I added a number of encryption programs to Bauer-Puntu Linux. One of the things that I've thought about doing for a while though was to move my email off of Google Apps. Sure, I knew that the NSA had been sucking up everything on the Internet since I found out about their Stellar Wind program, but I was rather shocked to learn about PRISM, and how the NSA basically has direct access to the big name email providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Even if they didn't though there are at least two other inherent privacy...

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How To Create A Backup System Image In Windows 8

Last Saturday I wanted to test the latest edition of Bauer-Puntu on my laptop at home. Normally I would have just wiped my laptop without a second though and installed Bauer-Puntu. The problem this time is that my wife has commandeered my laptop, and it is running Windows 8. I can't just wipe it or she'll be pissed. No, I needed to backup the whole thing to an external drive so I can restore it after I was done testing. In Windows 7 I would just go into Backup and Restore in the control panel, but that is missing in Windows 8. So where did they put it? You won't believe this cap, but they placed it in an area called Windows 7 File Recovery. Anyway, once you go in there you can create a system image like you did in Windows 7 by clicking...

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Bauer-Puntu 13.04 is Alive! Download It Now!

Well I finally got it done. I finished up Bauer-Puntu 13.04. This time I decided to cut out a lot of the stuff I don't really use. stuff like Metasploit, SET, and some other hacking tools. If you want to do some serious pentesting, Bauer-Puntu really isn't for you. If you want to do that, I suggest downloading BackTrack. Bauer-Puntu is still cool though. I mean, I am a Systems Engineer by trade, and therefore I decided to keep the stuff I do use quite a bit. Stuff like chntpw to reset local administrator passwords in Windows, as well as a number of encryption tools to keep the NSA and the FBI from snooping on you, or at the very least, keep them guessing a little bit. I also kept stuff like GParted for offline disk re-sizing, and some other...

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