Summary: how to diagnose and eliminate the xmlrpc.php WordPress exploit when it’s clobbering your web server. You’ve been running a public Ubuntu 12+ and Apache/LAMP web server for a while now. Until recently everything has worked fine, but suddenly your server is struggling to display even static pages. Sometimes content takes forever to load, and […]
Recently I was testing some web servers with the SSL Labs SSL web server test. This article describes the fixes I applied to Ubuntu Server 12.04 to get an A+ on the test. The SSL Labs Test Auditing the SSL certificates on your web server occasionally is a good idea, since you always want to […]
Update 2015: Support and development of TrueCrypt have, of course, now ended, although an independent audit of TrueCrypt revealed no severe security problems. I’d suggest the TrueCrypt fork VeraCrypt as a replacement. Note: I’m using Fedora 19 here. Results will vary on different versions. If you’re trying to run the TrueCrypt virtual disk encryption software […]
Update April 2018: I’d suggest using Let’s Encrypt for this instead. I do this just infrequently enough to forget the details. So here’s the process for purchasing and installing a SSL certificate for https on your Linux/Apache web server (using Ubuntu 12.04 and Apache 2.2 here): Generate Local Key/CSR, Purchase SSL Certificate Generate your key […]
The Fail2ban monitoring utility tracks your server logs and temporarily adjusts your firewall rules to block IP addresses that originate suspicious behavior. Out of the box, though, Fail2ban ignores some annoying activity. For example, in your Apache error logs, you’re seeing a lot of entries like this: File does not exist: /var/www/sql File does not […]
——————–Note: This article pertains to Ubuntu 12, and it applies to versions of Ubuntu or Debian that use init rather than systemd. To install SpamAssassin on Ubuntu 15+, see the instructions here.——————– In our previous installment, we set up a Postfix and Dovecot mail server with virtual domains and users on Ubuntu 12.04. It works […]
————— Update November 2021: Added instructions for using Dovecot and Postfix with Let’s Encrypt. Also adjusted Postfix config to block auth attempts over port 25. This setup will get you 90%+ on mail server security tests. ————— ————— Update November 2020: If you’re on Ubuntu 20.04, these instructions still mostly work as written. There is […]