Kali Linux evolution: What’s next for the open source pentesting Linux distro?

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March 2, 2020

When the popular security-focused BackTrack Linux distribution was redesigned from the ground up and given the name Kali Linux nearly seven years ago, I remember thinking that it was a fantastic name – and fitting, too.

I had the vivid image of the many-handed Hundu goddess of time and change in my mind, with her typical fierce expression and wielding a weapon/tool in each hand, and made an instant association with the newly Debian-based distro containing hundreds of preinstalled penetration testing programs. As it turned out, its developers did not have the goddess in mind – or anything else, really – when they chose the new name, but the association stuck with me as I continued to follow the distro’s development through the years.

[Source: Help Net Security]

What Are The Most Common Issues With Free Open Source Software?

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 2, 2020

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become a prominent aspect of the new age global economy. It has been analysed that FOSS makes up about 80-90% of any particular piece of today’s software. It is to be noted that software is an increasingly-critical resource in almost all businesses, both public and private. But, there are many issues with FOSS, according to the Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation established the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) in 2014 as a part of which its members gave funding and support for FOSS projects, which are important to worldwide data and information infrastructure. In 2015, CII finished the Census Project (“Census I”) to find out which software packages in the Debian Linux distribution had been the most important to the kernel’s overall security.

[Source: Analytics India Magazine]

X.Org/FreeDesktop.org Is Looking For Sponsors

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 2, 2020

The cost of cloud hosting — or in particular hosting their own GitLab instance and running continuous integration (CI) support for FreeDesktop.org projects — is putting financial strain on the X.Org Foundation. The X.Org Foundation estimates their annual hosting expenses this year to top out at 75k USD and at 90k USD for 2021. The gitlab.freedesktop.org hosting is done within the Google Cloud. This cost doesn’t include that of any continuous integration runners but just the expenditures from storing and serving build artifacts and images from the cloud to external runners.

Due to rising costs and not having any guaranteed recurring sponsors while the current hosting costs being unsustainable, the X.Org Foundation may need to disable continuous integration (CI) functionality in the months ahead if they don’t obtain additional funding.

[Source: Phoronix]

What does it take to commit to 100% open source?

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 2, 2020

Open source is arguably the most successful approach to developing and distributing business-critical infrastructure software. By removing all barriers to entry and giving developers absolute freedom, open source allows organizations to take software and implement it across their businesses in a truly seamless and customizable way. This can then lead to exponential adoption growth, which in turn powers the rapid feedback loops required of high-velocity, collaborative, community-driven development of feature-rich software.

Open source can also strengthen security hardening, ecosystem integrations, extensibility frameworks and other essential enterprise capabilities, while also maintaining high quality and reliability. While experts in the database market in particular agree that open source is becoming the norm, the question remains, just how open is this sector’s open-source software?

[Source: SDTimes.com]

Arm, Aeler Select IoT Linux Platform FoundriesFactory

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 2, 2020

Open OS platform provider Foundries.io has announced that it has garnered significant traction for FoundriesFactory across several market segments, including factory automation, robotics, WiFi security, and global asset tracking.

FoundriesFactory is a secure, customizable embedded Linux platform that enables customers, regardless of size, to develop, deploy and maintain secure Internet of Things and Edge devices for life. It offers support for a range of SoCs, SoMs and single board computers as the starting point for customers to deliver, deploy and maintain software on their own hardware.

[Source: TFiR]

InnerSource: How Open Source Best Practices Are Helping Enterprise Development Teams

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 2, 2020

Open source legend has it that Tim O’Reilly coined the term InnerSource back in 2000. While O’Reilly confesses that he doesn’t remember coming up with the term, he does remember recommending to IBM late in the 1990’s that they adopt some of the elements that make open source magic, namely — “collaboration, community, and low barriers to entry for those who wanted to share with each other.”

Today, more and more organizations are adopting InnerSource as a strategy, leveraging the methods and philosophy that power open source and make it great, to improve their internal development processes. InnerSource is the strategy incorporating open source methods into the development processes of commercial companies, and using them to create and publish proprietary software.

[Source: Security Boulevard]

No More WhatsApp! The EU Commission Switches To ‘Signal’ For Internal Communication

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 27, 2020

In a move to improve the cyber-security, EU has recommended its staff to use open source secure messaging app Signal instead of the popular apps like WhatsApp.

Signal is an open source secure messaging application with end to end encryption. It is praised by the likes of Edward Snowden and other privacy activists, journalists and researchers. We’ve recently covered it in our ‘open source app of the week‘ series. This is part of EU’s new cybersecurity strategy. There has been cases of data leaks and hacking against EU diplomats and thus policy is being put in place to encourage better security practices.

[Source: It’s FOSS]

Linux Kernel Seeing Patches For NVIDIA’s Proprietary Tegra Partition Table

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 27, 2020

As an obstacle for upstreaming some particularly older NVIDIA Tegra devices (namely those running Android) is that they have GPT entry at the wrong location or lacking at all for boot support. That missing or botched GPT support is because those older devices make use of a NVIDIA proprietary/closed-source table format. As such, support for this proprietary NVIDIA Tegra Partition Table is being worked on for the Linux kernel to provide better upstream kernel support on these consumer devices.

NVIDIA Tegra devices primarily rely on a special partition table format for their internal storage while some also support traditional GPT partitions.

[Source: Phoronix]

Linux now joins Android on Planet’s little Cosmo Communicator computer-phone

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 27, 2020

Fans of the PDA-inspired Cosmo Communicator can now run Linux on the handheld computer/smartphone from London-based company Planet Computers. Planet Computers announced general availability of the Cosmo Communicator in November after its crowdfunding campaign last year for the second iteration of a handheld computer inspired by the Psion Series 5 PDA from the 1990s. The Cosmo Communicator was promoted as being able to run Linux and Android but until now it didn’t have dual-OS functionality, leaving Android as the default OS and no option to switch to Linux.

The company has now announced that the Cosmo Communicator can run Debian Linux with KDE, which offers a full graphical interface.

[Source: ZDNet]

The “Cloud Snooper” malware that sneaks into your Linux servers

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 27, 2020

SophosLabs has just published a detailed report about a malware attack dubbed Cloud Snooper. The reason for the name is not so much that the attack is cloud-specific (the technique could be used against pretty much any server, wherever it’s hosted), but that it’s a sneaky way for cybercrooks to open up your server to the cloud, in ways you very definitely don’t want, “from the inside out”.

The Cloud Snooper report covers a whole raft of related malware samples that our researchers found deployed in combination. It’s a fascinating and highly recommended read if you’re responsible for running servers that are supposed to be both secure and yet accessible from the outside world – for example, websites, blogs, community forums, upload sites, file repositories, mail servers, jump hosts and so forth.

[Source: Naked Security]