One of probably the most prevalent discussions on Opensource.com in 2021 was in regards to the safety and privateness of your personal knowledge. A noticeable theme was that your knowledge is yours and that passwords had been key to safety. This yr’s safety authors supplied useful ideas and open supply instruments for retaining your knowledge and {hardware} safe.
Here is my top-five countdown of this yr’s safety journey.
Sahana Sreeram gives six elementary server safety ideas, beginning with updates and ending with malware scanning. This article gives a head begin together with your Linux servers both at dwelling or work. Pay additional consideration to the password power part and the instruments to create risk-reducing necessities on password insurance policies in your server, as that is probably the most essential apply on any working system you’re utilizing. This article is a sensible information to engaged on safety in your day-to-day work on Linux servers. As Sahana factors out, the safety panorama is undoubtedly increasing, and this text offers everybody the possibility to start out engaged on prevention.
This subsequent article is superb for individuals like myself who write a ton of documentation on the whole lot from articles to private analysis notes. Author Ksenia Fedoruk begins with an inventory of open supply cloud storage companies to save lots of your paperwork. Next, she covers the significance of encryption and the methods to make use of encryption with our docs. She additionally covers digital signature and watermarking of paperwork in clear element and what open supply instruments to make use of. Finally, the article covers using password safety of the docs we have made and labored with. The reminder within the ending follows a standard theme this yr in safety: Your knowledge is yours.
In this text, Don Watkins covers the accountability and caretaking of {hardware}. It leads off with a collection of instruments to wipe arduous drives in order that your knowledge cannot be taken from the following individual to make use of the gear. In a number of small walk-throughs, Don covers utilizing GNU shred, ShredOS, the dd command, and at last nvme-cli. Each of those can take away all the information out of your {hardware} and sanitize the arduous drives you had been engaged on and not want. Don’s concluding ideas present a mild reminder that if you’re promoting your {hardware}, that does not imply the following individual ought to have your knowledge. Your knowledge is yours.
As I identified earlier on this countdown, passwords are important to this yr’s safety round-up. In this text, our author Sumantro Mukherjee begins by overlaying what number of web sites can have (and may have) strict guidelines with regards to passwords. This step-by-step article covers the best way to use pwgen, beginning by putting in it after which producing passwords. This was a useful gizmo to cowl, and Sumantro particulars the best way to use some flags to generate a password tailor-made to any web site’s or utility’s necessities and insurance policies. At the top of this learn, the ultimate ideas embrace a hyperlink to a useful record of open supply password managers written earlier this yr by one other of our authors, Jason Baker. This is a crucial learn to start out making higher passwords in your on a regular basis use on web sites to forestall hacking or any knowledge loss in your accounts.
Finally, on this yr’s safety countdown, is an article about encryption and encrypting your recordsdata. Seth Kenlon covers an open supply cross-platform encryption software referred to as VeraCrypt. Seth’s walk-through explains in-depth the best way to set up and use VeraCrypt and exhibits the benefit of use of this cool little bit of software program. But not earlier than giving a short historical past on VeraCrypts predecessor, TrueCrypt, and the way VeraCrypt is backward appropriate with beforehand encrypted volumes by TrueCrypt. With this easy-to-use open supply software program encryption, Seth has confirmed you can personal your knowledge domestically and encrypt it the best way you need.
Honorable mentions
While these 5 had been my favourite this yr, listed below are two further honorable mentions which might be additionally well worth the learn.
Each of those offers a structured learn on safety insurance policies and adoption.
Final ideas on safety
I extremely suggest studying every of those articles and several others this yr. These will put together you for what’s to come back on the planet of safety in 2022. You might be the brand new yr’s safety champion.
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