In January 2017, I wrote an article about how to protect your Wordpress blog using the WP Fail2Ban plugin, fail2ban on your Linux/ FreeBSD host, and CloudFlare. Back then, the fail2ban was using the CloudFlare API V1, which was already deprecated since November 2016.
Although the actions were updated later to use CloudFlare API V4, I still had problems with the unbaning of IP addresses. IP addresses were banned, but the unban action failed.
This is just a short, but interesting blog post. When you have to troubleshoot authentication failures in a network that uses Windows Network Policy Server (NPS), the Windows event log is absolutely indispensable. The event log offers everything you need. The success and failure event log entries include all necessary information to get you back on track. If failure events would be logged…
Today, I was playing with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniSwitches and Access Guardian in my lab.
Sometimes you have to replace SSL certificates instead of updating them, e.g. if you switch from a web server SSL certificate to a wildcard certificate. The latter was my job today. In my case, the SSL certificate was used in a Microsoft Exchange 2016 deployment, and the NetScaler configuration was using multiple virtual servers. I’m using this little script for my NetScaler/ Exchange deployments.
When using multiple virtual servers, replacing a SSL certificate using the GUI can be challenging, because you have to navigate multiple sites, click here, click there etc.
Usually, bypassing a firewall is not the best idea. But sometimes you have to. One case, where you want to bypass a firewall, is asymmetric routing.
What is asymmetric routing? Imagine a scenario with two routers on the same network. One router offeres access to the internet, the other router provides access to other sites with site-2-site VPN tunnels.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Host 1 uses R1 as default gateway.
The last two days, I have supported a customer during the implementation of 802.1x. His network consisted of HPE/ Aruba and some HPE Comware switches. Two RADIUS server with appropriate policies was already in place. The configuration and test with the ProVision based switches was pretty simple. The Comware based switches, in this case OfficeConnect 1920, made me more headache.
The customer had already mac authentication running, so all I had to do, was to enable 802.
The Informationsverbund Berlin-Bonn (IVBB), the secure network of the german government , was breached by an unknown hacker group. Okay, a secure government network might be a worthy target for an attack, but your network not, right? Do you use the same password for multiple accounts? There were multiple massive data breaches in the past. Have you ever checked if your data were also compromised? I can recommend haveibeenpwned.com. If you want to have some fun, scan GitHub for -—-BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—–.
Some days ago, I have implemented one-time passwords (OTP) for NetScaler Gateway for one of my customers. This feature was added with NetScaler 12, and it’s a great way to secure NetScaler Gateway with a native NetScaler feature. Native OTP does not need any third party servers. But you need a NetScaler Enterprise license, because nFactor Authentication is a requirement.
To setup NetScaler native OTP, I followed the availbe guides on the internet.
On January 18, 2018, Microsoft has published KB4074871 which has the title “Exchange Server guidance to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities”. As you might guess, Exchange is affected by Meltdown & Spectre - like any other software. Microsoft explains in KB4074871:
Because these are hardware-level attacks that target x64-based and x86-based processor systems, all supported versions of Microsoft Exchange Server are affected by this issue.
Like Citrix, Microsoft does not offer any updates to address this issue, because there is nothing to fix in Microsoft Exchange.
In addition to my shortcut blog post about Meltdown and Spectre with regard of Microsoft Windows, VMware ESXi and vCenter, and HPE ProLiant, I would like to add some additional information about HPE Storage and Citrix NetScaler.
When we talk about Meltdown and Spectre, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities:
CVE-2017-5715 (branch target injection) CVE-2017-5753 (bounds check bypass) CVE-2017-5754 (rogue data cache load) CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 are known as “Spectre”, CVE-2017-5754 is known as “Meltdown”.
Change History 01-13-2018: Added information regarding VMSA-2018-0004 01-13-2018: HPE has pulled Gen8 and Gen9 system ROMs 01-13-2018: VMware has updated KB52345 due to issues with Intel microcode updates 01-18-2018: Updated VMware section 01-24-2018: Updated HPE section 01-28-2018: Updated Windows Client and Server section 02-08-2018: Updated VMware and HPE section 02-20-2018: Updated HPE section 04-17-2018: Updated HPE section
Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far.
