Stop Using apt-get

And start using configuration management. Embrace reproducibility of systems, and streamlined management with TechSNAP’s introduction to Configuration Management.

Plus the news of the week that could impact your systems, feedback, and more.

• SamSam Ransomware Hits Hospitals, City Councils, ICS Firms — The SamSam crew usually scans the Internet for computers with open RDP connections and they break into networks by brute-forcing these RDP endpoints to spread to more computers.
• RDP hijacking — how to hijack RDS and RemoteApp sessions transparently to move through an… — How you can very easily use Remote Desktop Services to gain lateral movement through a network, using no external software.
• EFF and Lookout Uncover New Malware Espionage Campaign Infecting Thousands Around the World — The trojanized apps, including Signal and WhatsApp, function like the legitimate apps and send and receive messages normally. However, the fake apps also allow the attackers to take photos, retrieve location information, capture audio, and more.
• Lenovo Discovers and Removes Backdoor in Networking Switches — Lenovo engineers have discovered a backdoor in the firmware of RackSwitch and BladeCenter networking switches. The company released firmware updates earlier this week.
• Intel says Meltdown / Spectre patch causes reboots in computers with newer processors too — Data center performance can degrade by up to 25 percent for certain workloads.
• VMware pulled Spectre patches on Friday. — Affected updates are the ones for ESXi under VMSA-2018-0004 that contained CPU microcode. Despite these being the affected patches, all of the patches under VMSA-2018-004 have been pulled.
• Spectre Mitigation Added To GCC 8, Seeking Backport To GCC 7 — The set of Spectre mitigation patches for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) were accepted to mainline and will be part of GCC 8 with the GCC 8.1 stable release that will likely be due out around March. This is on top of many other changes/features of GCC 8.
• New Linux Method to Check your System — grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*
• AMD Processor Security — AMD will make optional microcode updates available to our customers and partners for Ryzen and EPYC processors starting this week.
• Skyfall and Solace
• An Introduction to Configuration Management | DigitalOcean — As a broader subject, configuration management (CM) refers to the process of systematically handling changes to a system in a way that it maintains integrity over time. Even though this process was not originated in the IT industry, the term is broadly used to refer to server configuration management
• Configuration Management on the Desktop — It installs GNOME, sets up my wallpaper, applies my GTK/icon themes, sets up my keyboard shortcuts, etc. It also sets up my SSH keys, user dotfiles, OpenSSH config, and much more.