Some younger people do some hacking
Another long session of discussion and agreement
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May 2003 saw us return to the
ever popular Sheffield Hallam University IT Foundry at the Stoddart
Building just across the road from the Novotel and not far from
Sheffield Midland Station. Summer
has now finished. It rained a lot on the 3rd of May. We
might be experiencing BST and "summer" weather according to the weather
forecast on TV but as usual we just ain't a seein it just yet.
About twenty of us turned up for yet another successful and friendly
meeting which once again made all of us wonder why a company called
Microsoft even exist. There was much talk about the KDE 3 window
manager and the others which are still with us. Some days before the meeting I volunteered to give a talk about some introductory concepts to do with network security and internet security. It was a bit of a casual affair. The person who wanted the talk didn't turn up but everyone else did. It took more than an hour to introduce firewalls, network security tools and other concepts which may not be all that well known to the first time user of a GNU/Linux or BSD computer. Fortunately for us the OpenBSD people gave us some OpenBSD 3.2 CD sets and some posters to hand out for the meeting. These vanished into the mist in seconds.  The talk was started with myself explaining that computer security is about lessening the risk of attack from script kiddies and blackhats. It's not about an absolute form of security that definitely prevents access to certain places. The talk also stressed that hardware firewalls could be more useful than software firewalls but we were interested in BSD and GNU/Linux firewalls and related security tools which have thousands of less bugs than any Winduhs software and are therefore much more secure than anything Microsoft will ever produce. When it comes to OpenBSD the bugs that help the script kiddies along don't exist or if they do the OpenBSD team quickly find and fix any bug that might be present. A method was shown to find a way to put together a security policy on a small scale. Also when and where to use GnuPG with e-mail and it's use with documents so that they can't be read by anyone who is able to break in. The use of chkrootkit was demonstrated for detection of rootkits, worms and viruses. Viruses more or less don't exist in GNU/Linux and so it's a bit difficult to even find one. You can download the notes from the meeting by clicking here. Our June meeting will take place on the 7th of June at the Country Bookshop at Bakewell. Lets hope we see you there and we look forward to a dry June - we hope - and the possibility of an outdoor meeting in what has become an excellent venue for a ShefLUG meeting. A net connection will be available. Please bring your laptop or PC along. |
