A lot of the information that gets passed around the Linux community is really good, however, sometimes the information surrounding this topic specifically is not always of the highest quality and it can be difficult to decipher fact from fiction.

In light of the fact that I stand by my previous article, and under the realization that I’m really just some guy on the internet; I thought it would be best to reach out to a few experts and see what they say regarding antivirus software on Linux. I thought it was important that the information I passed on was coming from trusted and well-known vendors in both the Operating System space, as well as the perspective of the antivirus makers, and in that regard I will keep my own commentary to a minimum and let the experts speak for themselves.

Spoiler: For Linux itself, no. For the protection of Windows machines, yes, maybe.

“Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, said in a tweet on Saturday morning. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

This is a guide on setting up private apt repository that is accessible over a local network via HTTPS and is signed to avoid having to use –allow-unauthenticated to install packages.

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For my use case I have two distributions of packages, they are production and test distributions. The packages in each distribution varies based on what I have approved to be used in a live/production environment versus a test environment. This is so that I can separate out packages that I am using for normal everyday use versus ones I am currently testing with and not ready to go live with. If you are only using one distribution modify the instructions accordingly.

testssl.sh is a free command line tool which checks a server's service on any port for the support of TLS/SSL ciphers, protocols as well as recent cryptographic flaws and more.

You are being watched. Private and state-sponsored organizations are monitoring and recording your online activities. privacytools.io provides services, tools and knowledge to protect your privacy against global mass surveillance.

WhatsApp, which is used by 1.5bn people worldwide, discovered in early May that attackers were able to install surveillance software on to both iPhones and Android phones by ringing up targets using the app’s phone call function.

The malicious code, developed by the secretive Israeli company NSO Group, could be transmitted even if users did not answer their phones, and the calls often disappeared from call logs, said the spyware dealer, who was recently briefed on the WhatsApp hack.

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NSO’s flagship product is Pegasus, a program that can turn on a phone’s microphone and camera, trawl through emails and messages and collect location data.

NSO advertises its products to Middle Eastern and Western intelligence agencies, and says Pegasus is intended for governments to fight terrorism and crime.

But mostly to spy on people said governments don't particularly like, of course.

"To be honest, the spooks love PGP," Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the Usenix Enigma conference in San Francisco on Wednesdy. "It's really chatty and it gives them a lot of metadata and communication records. PGP is the NSA's friend."

The Infection Monkey is an open source Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) tool that assesses the resiliency of private and public cloud environments to post-breach attacks and lateral movement.

The goal of this project is to create a universal database of disallowed usernames for web applications. This repository contains a list of keywords that should be banned/disallowed to prevent users from registering with, on your software projects and apps to prevent impersonation and phishing on your platform.

Spectre and Meltdown are side-channel attacks which deduce the contents of a memory location which should not normally be accessible by using timing to observe whether another location is present in the cache.

A great article that explains the widely debated security vulnerabilities in some CPUs.