Aaron's Worthless Words

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security

Some stuff about securing your network and servers

Filtering Out the Noise on the Edge

There’s a lot of noise on the Internet. I’m not talking about certain news sites, either; I’m talking about stuff like port scans or attempts on weak services from all sorts of bad people on the Internet. A large chunk of that noise can be filtered by

A Little Politics for the New Year

Stretch at Packetlife has a lively little write-up on the Australian government’s attempt to implement a nation-wide web filtering service. From Packetlife.net: Setting aside the myriad of technical barriers to implementing such a system, the most obvious question is, “who decides what gets blocked?” When a corporation implements

Filtering Outbound Traffic

I’ve seen a thousand [tag]firewalls[/tag] in my time, and nearly all of them are poorly configured. The biggest culprit? No [tag]outbound[/tag] [tag]filtering[/tag]. I guess a lot of people think that firewalls are there to protect the network from the Internet, but that’s

SNMP v3 is Easy!

I finally got around to looking into [tag]SNMP[/tag] v3 and was shocked at how easy it actually is. When I first looked up info on it so many moons ago, I saw table after tables of views and privilege levels and thought I would have to put in

Setting Up SSH on IOS Devices

By default, most Cisco [tag]IOS[/tag] devices come configured to be accessed via telnet. This is probably fine for your house, but I really cringe when I run across corporate networks that use [tag]telnet[/tag] to access the devices. Telnet is old and out-dated and can be very

Security for Unmanned Devices

I was talking to a coworker the other day about setting up his home network more securely. “No problem,” I said, and we started listing devices on his network to see what we needed to do. I was pretty surprised that he had so many things on his network. I

Separation of Function

Separation of function is another important security concept that people often overlook. It can mean that a single person is only responsible for one part of a process. Or it can mean that one server only does one function. Or it can mean that one network is used for servers