Install and Setup OpenVAS on Kali Linux 2023/2024

Posted on December 26, 2023 by admin

Notes on installing OpenVAS on Kali Linux in 2023/2024

sudo apt install openvas

Run the setup script. This used to be called openvas-setup, now it is gvm-setup. Note that the script can take a long time to run.

gvm-setup

At the end of the script, it will give you a password. Use this password to log into the web interface. You can reset the password if needed.

If you run into issues with PostgreSQL, check out this post

Log into the web interface at

https://127.0.0.1:9392

Troubleshooting

On Kali Linux, you need to run commands as the _gvm user. You can do this by prepending the commands with

sudo runuser -u _gvm -- COMMAND

There are two — dashes, between the _gvm user and the COMMAND. Replace COMMAND with the GVM/OpenVAS command you want to execute.

Example, to list the current users do

sudo runuser -u _gvm -- gvmd --get-users

To create a new user run

sudo runuser -u _gvm -- gvmd --user=newadmin --new-password=longsecurepassword

Failed to find config ‘daba56c8-73ec-11df-a475-002264764cea’

If you receive a `Failed to find config ‘daba56c8-73ec-11df-a475-002264764cea'”` error,

try running the following command

sudo runuser -u _gvm -- greenbone-nvt-sync

This can take awhile, but it should sync all the files needed. Check the following link for more information.

https://forum.greenbone.net/t/cant-create-a-scan-config-failed-to-find-config/5509

The following link is also helpful for installing OpenVAS

https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/2021/02/28/howto-install-opevas-on-kali/

Common Power Issue Terminology

Posted on December 23, 2023 by admin

Here is a list of terms associated with power issues.

Name	Definition
Fault	Momentary loss of power
Blackout	Prolonged power outage
Sag	Momentary low voltage
Brownout	Prolonged Low voltage
Spike	Momentary spike in voltage
Surge	Extended spike in voltage
Inrush	Initial voltage “surge” when a device is plugged in

Here is a visual image.

Extract part of a tar archive

Posted on December 23, 2023 by admin

You can use tar -tvf to show the contents of a tar file.

tar -tvf  filename.tgz

You can extract a portion of the archive with

tar -zxvf filename.tgz path/inside/file -C destination/path

For instance, if I have a tar backup of my /home directory, and I need to extract a file out of the tarred Downloads to my current Downloads directory, I can do

tar -zxvf home.tgz home/incredigeek/Downloads/slack.deb ~/Downloads

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/list-the-contents-of-a-tar-or-targz-file/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24057301/bash-extract-only-part-of-tar-gz-archive

Table of Types of Law for Cyber Security

Posted on December 12, 2023 by admin

There are three types of law. Criminal, civil, and administrative.

Type of Law	Examples	Standard of Proof	Burden of Proof	Penalty
Criminal Law	Murder, assault, robbery, arson	Beyond a reasonable doubt	Innocent until proven guilty	Fines, Jail, Prison, Death penalty
Civil Law	Property Disputes, Personal injury	Preponderance of evidence	Claimant must give proof (most cases)	Compensation for injuries/damage
Administrative Law	Define standards of performance and conduct for major industries, organizations and government agencies

Table of Law

https://www.diffen.com/difference/Civil_Law_vs_Criminal_Law

List of Laws and Acts

The following is a list of “good to know” legislative acts.

Acronym	Name	Notes
CFAA	Computer Fraud and Abuse Act	First major cyber crime legislation
	Federal Sentencing Guidelines (1991)	Responsibility on senior management
ECPA	Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986	Made it a crime to invade the electronic privacy of an individual
CALEA	Comm Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994	Amended ECPA. Made wiretaps possible for law enforcement with a court order.
	Economic Espionage Act of 1996	Made theft no longer tied to something physical
FISMA	Federal Information Security Management Act	Cyber security requirements for government agencies
DMCA	Digital Millennium Copyright Act	Copyright protection is 70 years + 1st major revision added CD/DVD protections
USA PATRIOT	USA PATRIOT Act of 2001	Gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies broader wiretapping authorizations
	Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act (1998)	Made identity theft a crime. Up to 15 years in prison and $250,000 fine.
HIPPA	Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996)	Regulations for security measures for hospitals, physicians, and insurance companies
HITEC	Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009	Amended HIPPA. Updated privacy/security requirements for Business Associates (BAs), requires a written contract known as a business associate agreement (BAA). BAs are directly subject to HIPPA and enforcement actions like a covered entity. HITECH also introduced new data breach notifications.
GLBA	Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act	Limits services that banks, lenders, and insurance agencies can provide and information they can share with each other
COPPA	Child Online Privacy Protection Act	Seeks to protects children (<13 years old) online
FERPA	Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act	Gives students certain privacy rights. Deals with adults >18, and Children in school <18
ITAR	International Traffic in Arms Regulation	Regulates the export of military and defense related technologies
EAR	Export Administration Regulations	For commercial use, but may have military applications.

Table of Laws and Acts

Trademark, Patents, Copyright etc.

Name		Protection Length
Trademarks		10 Years
Patents		20 Years
Copyright		70 Years after the death of the author
Trade Secrets		Until they are leaked.

Table of Trademarks, Patents, Copyright, and Trade Secrets

Copy SSH Keys to Server with SFTP

Posted on December 5, 2023 by admin

These steps assume you already have a public SSH key, if not, create one

SSH-Copy-Id is an easier way to upload ssh keys, however, it does not work on all devices.

ssh to the remote server using your password.

If it is not already created, create the authorized_keys file under the .ssh folder

touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

vi ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Add your public key to the end of the authorized_keys file

Ensure that the correct owner and permissions are on the files.

The .ssh directory should be

chmod 700 .ssh

And the authorized_keys file should be 600

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Both should be owned by the user. Change username to your username.

sudo chown -R username:username .ssh/authorized_keys

Helpful links

https://blog.tinned-software.net/setup-sftp-only-account-using-openssh-and-ssh-key/

https://blog.tinned-software.net/ssh-passwordless-login-with-ssh-key/

How to install Armory Wallet on Fedora? – Notes

Posted on November 24, 2023 by admin

At the moment it does not look easily possible to install Armory Wallet on Fedora. Here are some notes about trying to get it to work.

The following person on Reddit was able to get it working on an older version of Fedora.

[Tutorial] Install Armory Wallet 0.96.4 on Fedora Workstation 29
byu/AmbitiousSpeed0 inBitcoin

The issue is that pyqt4 and pyqt4-devel are not available on the latest versions of Fedora.

The following prerequisites need to be installed

sudo dnf install git nano qt qt-devel python-devel libtool lmdb swig python-psutil

Other notes.

Armory relies on Bitcoin Core. You can install BitCoin core from https://bitcoincore.org. It will need to be fully synced which can take a long time “as in days/weeks”. Note that Armory will not work if you have the blockchain pruned. Which means you’ll need about 500GB of space for the BitCoin blockchain.

https://github.com/goatpig/BitcoinArmory

List of Symmetric Encryption Algorithms. Block and Key Size.

Posted on November 24, 2023 by admin

List of common symmetric encryption algorithms with their block and key size.

Name	Block Size	Key Size	Notes
AES Advanced Encryption Standard	128	128, 192, 256	Is Rijndael
Rijndael	Variable	128, 192, 256	Is AES
Blowfish	64	32-448	Often used in SSH
DES Data Encryption Standard	64	56
Triple DES	64	112-168	DES 3 times
IDEA	64	128	Used in PGP
RC4 Rivest Cipher 4	Stream Cipher	40-2048	Insecure/Not used, used in WEP, WPA, and SSL
RC5 Rivest Cipher 5	32, 64, 128	0-2040
RC6 Rivest Cipher 6	128	128, 192, 256
Skipjack	64	80	Developed by the NSA and supported key escrow
CAST-128	64	40-128
CAST-256	128	128, 160, 192, 224, 256
Twofish	128	1-256
ChaCha20	Stream Cipher	256

List of Common Symmetric Encryption Algorithms With Block and Key Size

Import/Export GPG Private Key

Posted on November 21, 2023 by admin

Note that if you need to copy both your Private and Public key, you’ll need to export both separately.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5587513/how-to-export-private-secret-asc-key-to-decrypt-gpg-files

List Keys

You can list all the GPG keys with the following command.

gpg --list-keys

Export Key

Change “keyID” to your key idea from the above command. The key ID is the long string of hexadecimal characters.

gpg --export-secret-keys "keyID" > private_key.asc

This will export the keys to private_key.asc. Rename as appropriate.

To export the Public Key

gpg --export "keyID" > public_key.asc

Import Key

To use the key, you’ll need to import and trust the key.

gpg --allow-secret-key-import --import private_key.asc

gpg --edit-key "keyID"

Then type

trust

Select level 5.

Import the Public Key

gpg --import public_key.asc

Decrypt Files

To decrypt a single file do

 gpg --batch --passphrase='password' ./file.gpg

If your GPG does not have a password, remove the whole `–passphrase=’password’` option

To decrypt multiple files you can run

for file in * ; do gpg --batch --passphrase='password' "$file" ; done

How To Check if RHEL/AlmaLinux needs a reboot after an update

Posted on October 23, 2023 by admin

Typically you’ll need to reboot a server after an update if the Linux Kernel was updated. It is possible that services need to be restarted.

There is some good information here https://serverfault.com/questions/122178/how-can-i-check-from-the-command-line-if-a-reboot-is-required-on-rhel-or-centos

Using Yum Utilities needs-restarting

Install the needs-restarting utility

sudo dnf install -y yum-utils

Once installed, we can check if we need to reboot with

sudo needs-restarting -r

The -r option only reports if a reboot is required.

If we wanted to automatically check and reboot, we could do

sudo needs-restarting -r || sudo shutdown -r

Alternative way

We could alternatively just check the kernel version and if it is different, manually reboot the machine. Note that there could be a couple cases where the kernel didn’t update, but you still need a reboot, or services needed to be restarted View links below for more information.

LAST_KERNEL=$(rpm -q --last kernel | perl -pe 's/^kernel-(\S+).*/$1/' | head -1)
CURRENT_KERNEL=$(uname -r)

test $LAST_KERNEL = $CURRENT_KERNEL || shutdown -r

View Fiber SFP details in Mikoritk RouterOS

Posted on October 11, 2023 by admin

Quick and simple way to check the details on a fiber SFP on a Mikrotik router. Replace sfp1_name with the SFP name or leave out the name and select a number.

/interface ethernet monitor "sfp1_name"

Results

                      name: sfp1
                    status: link-ok
          auto-negotiation: done
               full-duplex: yes
           tx-flow-control: no
           rx-flow-control: no
               advertising: 
  link-partner-advertising: 
        sfp-module-present: yes
               sfp-rx-loss: no
                  sfp-type: SFP-or-SFP+
        sfp-connector-type: LC
       sfp-link-length-9um: 3000m
           sfp-vendor-name: UBNT
    sfp-vendor-part-number: UF-SM-1G-S
         sfp-vendor-serial: FL31F80285729
    sfp-manufacturing-date: 20-02-20
            sfp-wavelength: 1550.32nm
           sfp-temperature: 64C
        sfp-supply-voltage: 3.23V
       sfp-tx-bias-current: 30mA
              sfp-tx-power: -5.254dBm
              sfp-rx-power: -4.1dBm
           eeprom-checksum: good
                    eeprom: 0000: 01 02 03 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 .....