It is nice to see that Ubuntu Linux was found to be the most difficult system to crack in the pwn2own “hack contest”, when Vista gave in on the third day when 3rd party apps were game. OSX fell first, on the second day due to a Safari bug.

Not so nice to see breaking systems called “hacking”. Again, hackers build stuff, they don’t brake it. It makes me extra sad to see so many Ubuntu and Linux-loving bloggers happy about the failure of other systems. Calling your system good is good marketing. When you laugh at failures in other systems it is laughing at their users, which does not make them interested in you or your offering.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released software which it urged some of America’s largest universities to employ in order to monitor their networks for unauthorized file sharing. Not only do the universities not owe the MPAA anything, but the toolkit was found by security specialists to raise some major privacy concerns. Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs at EDUCAUSE, says of the toolkit, “no university network administrator in their right mind would install this toolkit on their networks.”

Ubuntu 7.10 actually comes with some pretty good security practices already set up for you. For example, the root account is locked and no network services are enabled by default. If you’re planning on making your Ubuntu system publicly accessible, here are some things to consider before you forward a port or public IP address.

If you run an ssh server on your Ubuntu system, and allow password based authentication, then you’ll want to install DenyHosts. It watches the log files and blocks the IP address of those who fail to authenticate too many time. As always, while this article is Ubuntu oriented, the same basic procedure works on other distros.

The first step to blocking the baddies with DenyHosts is installation.

sudo apt-get install denyhosts

Once you get it installed, there is a bit to adjust in the configuration file.

After reading this article at HappyLinuxGuy’s Happy Linux Thoughts page, I thought I might share with you a way to recover password on a *nix system. The commands and screenshots here will be Ubuntu oriented, but this basic process should work for any distro.