Code Exploit Cyber Security

Why “The Genesis Heist” Is One of the Most Innovative Projects in Web3 Right Now - And How to Mint The Web3 NFT Comic

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:11:00 +0000

The Genesis Heist is the first in the Zeus Comic series following a group of Bitcoin engineers operating a facility in the lush valley of Cascadia, must solve the mystery of a heist from a remote planet.

The Genesis Heist is the first-ever Web3 comic book NFT series that fuses AI-generated art, blockchain education, and gamified Bitcoin treasure hunts.

Designed for the next generation of digital citizens, the project combines storytelling, puzzles, and real cryptocurrency rewards to teach practical blockchain and AI knowledge.

The project aims to incentivise education in highly relevant emerging technologies using gamified interactive content, while creating a sustainable digital collectibles economy.

How to Mint The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic Book NFT- Configuring MetaMask for the Ethereum Classic ETC Network

MetaMask is a gateway to Web3 technology allowing users on mobile or browser to interact with software applications called dApps built on Blockchain protocols.

At this point, it’s worth noting the difference between Ethereum Classic ETC and Ethereum ETH which is a fork of ETC and therefore share the same algorithmic programming.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is secured by Proof-of-Work algorithm, which makes ETC a Sovereign Grade Censorship Resistant Blockchain like Bitcoin, whiles Ethereum (ETH) uses a Proof-of-Stake* algorithm susceptible to interference from external forces including the risk of capture by malicious organizations.

Both are EVM compatible and Turing Complete, which enables them to execute Smart Contracts like the one that generated The Genesis Heist Comic NFTs.

Creating a MetaMask account does not require a user to provide their email address or phone number, just a 12-word seed phrase and a password which should be kept secure, not to be shared with anyone and ideally stored in multiple locations.

Download MetaMask on your mobile or install the browser extension supported in Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and the Brave Crypto browser.

Follow the instructions to create a new account and record your 12-word seed phrase carefully.

Make sure you set a very strong complex password to protect your MetaMask account. Unlock wallet.

1.MetaMask Initial Interface

Notice after you have unlocked your MetaMask wallet, you are connected to the Ethereum Mainnet with a US$0 ETH balance. You can tap to copy the address and email it to yourself but DO NOT send any ETC to the address at this point.

Spend some time familiarising yourself with the options tabs including viewing your private key.

2.Selecting a Blockchain Network

As a gateway to Web3, MetaMask allows you to connect to several Blockchains besides the default Ethereum network.

Click on the networks drop down menu to reveal other networks, however in our case we will proceed to create a custom RPC network for Ethereum Classic ETC.

3.Creating a Custom RPC for Ethereum Classic Network ETC

Scroll down on the network options and select Custom RPC to begin setting up the Ethereum Classic network.

RPC stands for “Remote Procedure Call” which is a protocol used by machines to call other remote programs on Blockchain networks.

Ethereum Classic blockchain which runs the ZEUS COMIC smart contract shares similar charactristics to Ethereum, except operating a proof-of-work algorithm and different Remote Procedure Call RPC network settings to connect to the blockchain.

Network Name: Ethereum Classic
New RPC URL: https://etc.rivet.link
Chain ID: 61
Currency Symbol (optional): ETC
Block Explorer URL (optional): https://blockscout.com/etc/mainnet/

Once satisfied you have entered the details correctly, click “Save” and Add ETC network to MetaMask.

4.Connecting, Viewing and Managing Your New MetaMask ETC Wallet

Congratulations! You have now completed the process of configuring ETC network on MetaMask.

Notice Ethereum Classic now appears at the top of the wallet and ETC as the main account. Test sending some ETC to your wallet address from an exchange like LBank and don’t forget to allow 0.01 ETC for transaction fees.

It is always advisable to test transactions with small amounts before moving a large amount of funds.

Minting or Buying The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic NFTs on Ethereum Classic ETC

Well done for coming this far, we are now ready to mint The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic NFT by accessing the mint page on the secure URL: https://www.thegenesisheist.app/

Click on the “Connect Wallet” at the top right after transferring your ETC to your MetaMask wallet, confirm network configurations and Connect Wallet.

MetaMask will pop up a notification to approve your wallet to interact with The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic NFT Smart Contract, and then you can mint for 1 ETC The Genesis Heist Comic NFT on the Ethereum Classic ETC network.

Minting should complete after confirming gas fees on MetaMask and receive your Genesis Heist Comic NFT.

Click on Read Comic Book to open the comic reader program in your browser to reveal the flipbook Genesis Heist Comic book.

Why “The Genesis Heist” Is One of the Most Innovative Projects in Web3 Right Now

Most of us in the crypto community are deeply familiar with the need for real education around how Bitcoin and blockchain tech actually work. But let’s be honest — whitepapers, technical docs, and YouTube explainers can be dry, overwhelming, or just plain inaccessible to newcomers.

That’s where The Genesis Heist stands out.

🚀 A Comic Book That Teaches Bitcoin? Yes, Really.

The Genesis Heist is more than a comic — it’s an immersive, story-driven educational experience. Set in a vibrant, visually stunning world, the story revolves around themes of decentralization, power, and digital freedom. But underneath the rich narrative and bold artwork is something deeper:

✅ Grassroots education on proof-of-work technology
✅ Exploration of real-world Bitcoin use cases
✅ Hands-on exposure to wallet management and asset security

Through storytelling, it teaches people not just what Bitcoin is, but why it matters.

🧩 The Bitcoin Treasure Hunt: Learn by Doing

One of the most exciting parts of the project is the Bitcoin treasure hunt embedded within the story. Clues throughout the comic point readers to a real treasure — Bitcoin locked behind a puzzle.

To play, you’ll need to:

Understand Bitcoin wallet fundamentals
Navigate how UTXOs and private keys work
Practice real asset security principles

It’s a gamified, practical education that rewards curiosity and engagement — not just consumption.

Think of it as onboarding to the Bitcoin rabbit hole, but through a cyber-noir, high-stakes narrative that hooks you emotionally and intellectually.

🔍 Why It’s Innovative

Blending Art with Infrastructure: This isn’t just “blockchain for artists” — it’s art as infrastructure for onboarding. It builds emotional bridges to technical ideas.

Real Utility: Unlike so many NFT projects that are just speculative fluff, The Genesis Heist offers tangible learning outcomes.

Long-Term Vision: It plants seeds for a more informed, secure, and philosophically grounded next wave of crypto adopters.

Decentralized Distribution: By living on IPFS and embracing Web3-native formats, it preserves its mission of censorship resistance and open access.

🤝 Why the Community Should Support It

If you care about:

Wider adoption of Bitcoin and PoW tech

Onboarding new users the right way

Building community through storytellin

Investing in long-term value over hype

Then The Genesis Heist is exactly the kind of project we need to amplify.

It’s rare to see a project with this kind of vision, execution, and grassroots energy in the Web3 space — and it deserves the support of both the community and serious-minded investors.

Check it out at https://thegenesisheist.app and see for yourself why The Genesis Heist isn’t just a comic… it’s a movement.

Adding Your ZEUS COMIC NFT to Your MetaMask Wallet

After your comic is successfully minted, you can inspect the asset on BlockScout ETC explorer Zeus Comic Inventory

ZEUS COMIC Contract Address: 0x26B24bE02620214995911a5123e964EF7A962a79

Locate your asset ID# in block explorer and make note of the number. If not already appeared click NFT tab in MetaMask and +Import NFT. Input the Zeus Comic contract address and your ID# to manually add the comic NFT assets to your wallet.

Joining the Hunt for The Missing Keys to 100,000 Sats

As awareness of the project continues to grow, join the community on Telegram and Twitter where you can participate in the hunt to decipher the missing keys to 100,000 SATs hidden in the pages of the comic.

Education to onboard new people is encouraged to experience the innovative solutions presented by blockchain networks and applications. Stay stuned for a follow up comic series and updates on the project including Zeus Encryption, Zeus Mail and our digital celestial art artifacts.

Project Social Media Links:

The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic GitHub Page: https://github.com/ZeusPayETC/TheGenesisHeist

The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic Telegram: https://t.me/+ahBGWbW09kxkYmI0

The Genesis Heist Web3 Comic Twitter/X: https://x.com/ZeusPayETC

Scan QR for GitHub

How to Buy Bored APE Yacht Club NFTs Using ETC MetaMask Wallet on Ethereum Classic Network

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Tue, 31 May 2022 21:05:00 +0000

Summer of 2021 saw the rise and wild craze of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs sweep across the nascent Blockchain space. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Tokens or in simpler terms, irreplaceable tokens that are unique, procedurally generated by algorithms and brought to life in a process called “minting”.

An initial quantity of 10,000 unique Bored Ape NFTs were minted at the average price of US$190, granting its owners complete property ownership rights to the digital artifacts. Holders of the Bored Ape NFT can commercialise them into comics, films, music, books, TV commercials or any other media projects of their choice.

By late 2021, the Bored Ape NFTs gained so much popularity, they caught the attention of celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Justin Bieber, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Eminem, Jimmy Fallon, Serena Williams, and Seth Green among many others, generating sales over US$1 Billion.

Bored Ape Yacht Club ETC NFT #4853

The success of the first wave of Apes caused a lot of excitement in the NFT community, spurring on hosts of innovation in Web3 technology including the Ethereum Classic Network which this article will remain focussed.

To keep Ape NFT owners incentivised to hold their assets, digital potions known as Serums were airdropped to all holders, and upon exposure, causes the Apes to mutate with varying unique characteristics and distinguishing features.

Mutant Serums come in 3 forms: M1, M2 and M3 being the most powerful. All Apes can drink a veil of serum and become a mutant. If you were lucky enough to own a Bored Ape on the Ethereum Classic Network before 26^th April 2022, you would most likely be one of the lucky receivers of those airdrops.

Mutant Ape Yacht Club ETC NFT #5646

Those who missed out on the Serum drops however, have another chance to mint a mutant Ape out of a public offering of 10,000 mutants for only 2 ETC. Depending on when you are reading this article, you may still be in luck to mint one from their website.

No need to worry if you missed the mint because you can always pick one up on the secondary market, and in this article, we shall explore all there is to know about NFTs and the Web3 technology that powers them. By the end, I’m hoping you’ll be confident enough to navigate your way through ETC NFTs.

NFT Use Cases in Financial Services Beyond Art

NFT has become a buzzword in the Blockchain space as well as Twitter lately, but what exactly are they?

Non-fungible token (NFT) is a financial security consisting of digital data stored in a blockchain, a form of distributed ledger. Proof of ownership of an NFT is absolute and demonstrated when a holder transfers the digital asset to another person.

NFTs typically contain references to digital files such as videos, audio, and photos. Because NFTs are uniquely identifiable, they differ from cryptocurrencies, which are fungible.

Beyond the art, NFTs have various foundational use cases besides granting a person complete ownership rights. Listed below are a handful of those use cases for NFTs now and in the future:

-Storing an individual’s medical records confidentially without risk of tamper. E.g. Birth certificates

-Ownership, sales and transfer of land deeds while protecting sensitive data in the Real Estate industry

-Issuance of tickets with unique IDs for sporting events like FIFA Worldcup, and fan collectable NFTs

-Tracking the manufacturing process of products from factories to consumers in supply chain industry

-Brand awareness and engagement with their customer base, using NFTs for loyalty rewards and promotions

-Automated voting systems where access to physical polling booths is limited, cutting reliance on paper

-Proof of attendance and issuance of tamper-proof academic certificates by colleges and universities

-NFTs with high liquidity like Bored Apes can be used in De-Fi as collateral for fiat-based loans, and Stablecoin loans paid in USDT, USDC, Dai or Pax

-Storing and transmitting data such as music, programs and images across planets using IPFS protocol

-Ride sharing apps like Uber, where ETC is used to settle transactions between driver and passengers

-Building smart debit cards using ETC network as a value transfer rail to bank the unbanked, at a maintenance cost of US$0.00

-Building NFT objects and digital land masses in metaverse game environments, leveraging smart contract programs to interact and operate their own economies

-Embedding Smart Contract security algorithms in hardware such as firewalls, to protect organisations' data against cyber attacks, data leaks and ransomware

-Enable aid organisations such as The Red Cross, to transfer and store value using ETC anywhere around the planet, for essential relief efforts in conflict and war torn zones safely and securely

-Building advanced robotic machines using NFT Smart programs as a medium of communication

How to Configure MetaMask on Ethereum Classic Network

MetaMask is a gateway to Web3 technology allowing users on mobile or browser to interact with software applications called dApps built on Blockchain protocols.

At this point, it’s worth noting the difference between Ethereum Classic ETC and Ethereum ETH which is a fork of ETC and therefore share the same algorithmic programming.

Both are EVM compatible and Turing Complete, which enables them to execute Smart Contracts like the one that generated the Bored Ape NFTs.

Download MetaMask on your mobile or install the browser extension supported in Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and the Brave Crypto browser.

Follow the instructions to create a new account and record your 12-word seed phrase carefully.

Make sure you set a very strong complex password to protect your MetaMask account. Unlock wallet.

1.MetaMask Initial Interface

Spend some time familiarising yourself with the options tabs including viewing your private key.

2.Selecting a Blockchain Network

As a gateway to Web3, MetaMask allows you to connect to several Blockchains besides the default Ethereum network.

Click on the networks drop down menu to reveal other networks, however in our case we will proceed to create a custom RPC network for Ethereum Classic ETC.

3.Creating a Custom RPC for Ethereum Classic Network ETC

Scroll down on the network options and select Custom RPC to begin setting up the Ethereum Classic network.

RPC stands for “Remote Procedure Call” which is a protocol used by machines to call other remote programs on Blockchain networks.

If you are configuring on mobile, populate the settings as shown in the shot above. Copy settings below;

- Network Name: Ethereum Classic

- New RPC URL: https://www.ethercluster.com/etc

- Chain ID: 61

- Currency Symbol (optional): ETC

- Block Explorer URL (optional): https://blockscout.com/etc/mainnet/

Once satisfied you have entered the details correctly, click “Save” and Add ETC network to MetaMask.

4.Connecting, Viewing and Managing Your New MetaMask ETC Wallet

Congratulations! You have now completed the process of configuring ETC network on MetaMask.

It is always advisable to test transactions with small amounts before moving a large amount of funds.

Minting or Buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs on Ethereum Classic Network

Well done for coming this far, we are now ready to mint a Bored Ape or for those who may have missed the mint, a lot of Apes are available on the secondary market https://etcbayc.com/. for low prices.

Click on the “Marketplace” after transferring your ETC to your MetaMask wallet and Connect Wallet.

MetaMask will pop up a notification to approve your wallet to interact with the Bored Ape Smart Contract, and from there you can browse and purchase any Bored Ape NFT on the ETC network.

If you’re lucky enough to be reading this on 31st May, 2022 while the mutant mint is still live, you can access the mutant Ape Yacht Club website https://etcmayc.com/, connect your wallet (loaded with 2 ETC) and click on Mint Live for a chance to own a random mutant out of the 10,000 offered in the public mint.

After minting is complete simply click on “My Wallet” at the top right corner to view your digital asset.

Some people like to display their Apes on MetaMask mobile to show off to their friends. To do that,

- Navigate to the NFT section of your MetaMask

- Click “Import NFTs” to open a new window with “Address” and “ID”

- For Bored Ape contract address copy and paste this: 0x59E34EF31049565D041Aec6137F40f518c2D47c1

- For Mutant Ape contract address copy and paste this: 0x69ACB3240cce53d6293619e6AF784Fdda777e45d

- The ID is the number # of the Ape you wish to add to MetaMask- Click Import to finish.

Classic Apes Revolution – A Bored Ape Comic Series

If you missed out on both Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFTs, do not despair. The developers are working on a Classic Bored Ape Comic Series scheduled for release later this year.

Available to mint for 1.5 ETC, holders of the NFT will be entitled to the full comic book when it is released, and a chance to earn passive income. More details will be revealed after the public mint completes so keep an eye out on their website for updates.

Conclusion

This write up is aimed at demonstrating the setup of MetaMask Wallet on Ethereum Classic Network ETC.

You should now be able to navigate the ETC NFT space with your account and own a premium Bored Ape NFT on the immutable Ethereum Classic Network.

For security, it is advisable to create a new account in MetaMask every time you interact with a new smart contract.

The next few years are going to be exciting for the development of NFTs and smart contracts, and I hope it becomes the subject matter of further research by educational institutions.

If you found this article useful or a whale, and would like to donate ETC to help others around the world set up an ETC MetaMask Wallet, please send your kind gestures to this ETC address:

ETC: 0x5939bFbc305C92E6b6fF3B6EEFa717238D640D12

Bored Ape Yacht Club ETC NFT #2514

Thank you for investing your time with us and remember, Never ever invest more than you are willing to lose on NFTs or any Blockchain project.

Credits to all organisations and development teams at ETCBAYC and Ethereum Classic Org

Resource: ETC Planets NFT Marketplace

Software Non-Custodial: Exodus Wallet Hardware Cold Storage: Trezor Wallet

ETC Domain Name Service: HENS Domains

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber

Sophos XG Firewall – The Complete Build and Maintenance Guide | Basic

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Mon, 04 May 2020 18:24:00 +0000

This guide is intended for network administrators aiming to deploy a Sophos XG firewall device in an on-premise network environment. To ensure familiarity with the device interface, the first section of the document will be dedicated to an overview of all components of Sophos XG firewall.

Since the device is expensive, costing about £2,000 for on-prem and £4,000 for the cloud offering, Sophos have made available an online live demo which you can register to use for practice;

https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/products/sophos-central/demo.aspx

Logging into the portal should bring you straight into the Control Center interface as shown below:

The device serial number can be found at top left right below Control Center, along with system metrics like performance, interfaces, system resource usage, high availability configuration status and the total up-time of the firewall.

The left pane of the interface offers all the configurable options available to your XG firewall split into categories below:

Monitor & Analyse

Control Center

Current Activities

Reports

Diagnostics

Protect

Firewall

Intrusion Prevention

Web

Applications

Wireless

Web Server

Advanced Threat

Central Synchronization

Configure

VPN

Network

Routing

Authentication

System Services

System

Profiles

Hosts and Services

Administration

Backup & Firmware

Certificates

Access Monitor&Analyze > Current Activities to reveal all live users and remote users. An administrator can disconnect any user whose machine may be posing a threat to the network.

Sophos XG offers a very detailed comprehensive report statistics on the performance and state of your firewall. Navigate the tabs to find information displayed in easy to analyse pie charts about Network and threats, VPN, Email and Compliance.

Diagnostics tab offers a whole host of tools for the Sophos XG firewall. You can perform packet capture analysis, manage connection list and grant access to Sophos support for a set duration of time to access the device. More details will be explored as this guide progresses.

Sophos XG Registration & Set-Up

Now that we have explored the interface of the Sophos XG firewall, we can now proceed to register and set up our device. We shall explore 5 topics into detail regarding getting your XG firewall operational;

1. Creating a Sophos ID

2. Start up and Registration

3. Completing set up wizard

4. Confirming your firewall is operational

5. Verifying & Synchronizing Licenses

Creating a Sophos ID

To set up a Sophos ID, visit Sophos.com > My Account > Create Sophos ID.

Fill in the name and business email and confirm you are not a robot and register and account.

Confirm your email address with the link. You want to check your junk mail folder if you haven’t received the message in a while.

Set a very strong password and log into your account with the new Sophos ID.

You may want to fill in the backup email and phone information in the event you need to recover your Sophos ID account.

Once the backup information is completed and saved, access My Applications > MySophos where you can select My Profile. Fill in the information about the company you are setting up the Sophos XG firewall.

Be sure to save all your changes after completing your profile and the creation of your Sophos ID.

Start-Up and Registration

Before we begin setting up and registering our firewall, there are some pre-requisites pictured below;

A Sophos ID which we created in our previous step will be required, along with details of your internet connection from an ISP containing the following information:

-Usable public IP addresses

-Subnet mask

-DNS server information

You can also visit Sophos.com/get-started-xg to download the latest set up guide information about XG.

Assemble your XG Firewall and your WAN to Port 2 and LAN to Port 1 as pictured below:

If you have a laptop connected to port 1 and have DHCP enabled, the laptop should pick up an IP address in range of the Sophos XG device and you can log into the interface with IP 172.16.16.16:4444

Alternatively, you can hard code an IP address in range on your network card. Eg. 172.16.16.2 which should put your Sophos device and laptop on the same subnet.

Log into the XG interface with default credentials admin/admin and accept the end user licenses and terms and conditions associated with the use of Sophos XG firewalls.

We can now proceed with device registration by clicking Basic Setup

Using the details provided by your ISP, populate the public IP, subnet mask, default gateway and DNS information and click save changes. Give the device about 30 seconds to initialize the network config.

You will know the network update is successful with a confirmation green tick pop-up. The device is now ready for Registration by clicking the button and checking if its able to access the internet. If you get an error at this stage, you may want to double check your settings from ISP. [Use Sophos ID credentials].

The registration process may take a while, so once complete you can proceed to synchronize your license with Sophos.

Completing Set-Up Wizard

Although this step may be skipped, it is advisable to run the set-up wizard for the first time to ensure the necessary modules and services are activated and verified. System configurations can always be modified manually after the device is fully operational.

Two deployment modes exist for Sophos XG, Bridge Mode and Gateway Mode

Bridge mode is used when there is an existing firewall on premises, and you connect your Sophos device to port 2(WAN) using a crossover cable. The firewall will then acquire its WAN IP via DHCP.

Gateway mode is used when the Sophos is directly connected to the modem/router of the ISP on port 2 WAN with Port 1 LAN connected to the switch on premises.

The most common option used is Gateway Mode which should take you to the next step configuring your network interfaces. Select a port, assign an IP address and mask and select the zone you want the port assigned to. Eg. LAN, WAN, DMZ etc.

If you set your device to pick up DHCP automatically, the details should be found on this page. You can input manual DNS settings like Google 8.8.8.8 or CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 Host name will be your Sophos XG serial number which should already be populated. You can add a description if preferred.

The next step takes you to default network policy settings. Tick User/Network Rule and recommended to leave Web Filter, App Filter and IPS as None.

Network policies essentially lets an administrator set LAN – WAN traffic rules for web filtering, app filtering and Intrusion Prevention Systems. Traffic can be denied to all, allowed to all, blocked for explicit content and advertising content.

More tools are available to configure these rules to best suit the scenario of the production network.

If you have an email server, the details can be populated here for system notifications. This setting can be edited later in the configuration tools.

The last step is to set the time zones, date and time for your XG device. You can tick the box to synchronize with NTP Server.

Double check all the settings on the overview windows and Click Finish to exit the config wizard.

A warning is likely to flash prompting the wizard will flush all current settings. Since this is our initial set-up, you can click OK to save the new settings.

The XG device should then reboot to configure the mode of operation for the firewall.

Confirming your Firewall is Operational

Once the XG has booted up, you can log in with the default credentials Admin/Admin for the console.

In control centre, Click on Interfaces to inspect the status of the LAN and WAN configurations we performed in the set-up wizard.

Like the image above, you should see the status of all your ports on the XG including LAN, WAN, Wireless and other unassigned ports.

From there, click on Firewall and inspect the rules set from the wizard are still present. The config will allow traffic from any host on the LAN to the wider internet on the WAN.

Confirm everything is working by visiting your favourite sites like google.com or Sophos.com

To confirm the connection status, access Network and inspect the ISP settings configured in the set-up wizard is active and connected. Check your ISP and DNS settings if you struggle to access the external internet domains like Google.com

Verifying & Synchronizing License

Now the Sophos XG is set up and operational, we can verify and synchronize our device with Sophos licensing portal.

This can be done in two ways; Access the Administration > Licencing tab or click directly on the Administration tab on the left main menu.

This interface displays all registration information as well as module subscription details subscribed to. Click in Synchronize to effect any changes.

You can check the expiry dates of added module subscriptions like Network Protection, Email Protection and Email Protection.

Activating New Subscription Package

Depending on the requirements of the company, a network administrator may need to install other modules such as Webserver Protection or Sandstorm.

Any required modules will need to be purchased from Sophos with license issues in a .pdf document like the sample below:

This document displays information about the module purchased, the licence key and duration of the licence in months. Copy this key and return to the licensing page on Sophos XG.

Click Activate Subscription and input the license key provided by Sophos

A pop-up window should appear where you can paste and click Verify to validate and activate your new security package which should show a status as Subscribed in Green when active.

Sophos XG Firmware Update and Roll-Back

This section of the tutorial will examine the status of the firmware running the Sophos XG firewall, versioning and how to update as well as roll back to a previous firmware version if things go wrong.

When an update becomes available, you would get a prompt the next time you access the dashboard. You can proceed by clicking the link, bearing in mind never to update anything without first backing up the current configuration.

Alternatively, you can manually navigate to System > Backup & Firmware to access the backup interface, API, firmware and the ability to import or export a firewall configuration to file.

Only after you’ve taken a config backup, click to download and install the new firmware bearing in mind a device reboot will be required to complete the upgrade. Check the firmware version when the system boots back online.

Some situations may arise that sees the XG firewall offline and unable to automatically download firmware updates. Using your Sophos ID account, you can access the firmware

from a repository download page https://www.sophos.com/en-us/support/utm-downloads.aspx

Your device serial number will be required to locate the correct firmware, which can be found on your Sophos XG dashboard.

Once your firmware is located, download it to your PC and upload it via the upload firmware tab below the exiting active firmware running on the firewall. Give it a few minutes for upgrade and reboot.

Whenever a firmware update is performed on the Sophos XG, the system preserves the previous firmware in the event a roll back is required. Navigate to Systems > Administration > Firmware and notice both old and new firmware images are available in the tab.

To roll back to previous version, simply click on Boot firmware image and OK to roll back the XG device.

Bear in mind any configuration changes made to the device will be lost when firmware is rolled back.

Sophos XG Administrator Password and Device Access

In this section we shall examine the administrator password, how to change it and manage access to the Sophos XG device.

When you log into your dashboard, you will notice an alert highly recommending the Admin password be changed. Click on the link or navigate to Systems > Administration > Device Access.

A local service access clients list should be displayed, which offers control settings of the network based on access zones. LAN, WAN, DMZ, VPN and Wi-Fi zones can all be selected according to Admin Services, Authentication Services, Network Services and Other Services to limit exposure of network zones.

If more specific rules are required such as limiting SSH access to only Admin computers, click to edit and fine tune ACL exception rules to your network specifications.

Remember to save any changes made to the device access control list.

At the bottom of the page can be found the section to change your default Admin password. This task is highly recommended as Sophos XG Firewalls ship with the default admin passwords, which are very well known to hackers.

It is recommended to set a very complex and strong password combination, preferably with lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols to ensure the device cannot be breached using brute force attacks or password dictionary attack methods.

Sophos XG Using Captive Portal for Authentication

This section will examine how we can use captive portal on the XG firewall for authentication.

Why Use Active Portal?

-You can have firewall access rules that require authentication to access the internet or various network resources.

-If a user fails to access the internet or network resources using SSO, NTLM, Radius or Guest Services, Captive Portal can be used to authenticate the user and gain access to those resources.

-Captive Portal serves as a last resort for authenticating with the firewall.

When Using Captive Portal for Internet Access

-An unknown user trying to access the internet should be redirected to the Captive Portal.

-On most networks, DNS settings are inherited on the WAN port from the Internet Service Provider (ISP).

-When you are blocking WAN access for unknown users, they cannot reach the DNS server that is out on the WAN.

-Therefore, a user trying to access the internet where authentication is required, will not be redirected to the Captive Portal.

-A separate firewall access rule is that does not require authentication is needed for WAN DNS access.

WAN DNS Access Rule to be added:

· Create a firewall rule by clicking on “+Add Firewall Rule” in the upper right corner of the firewall user admin interface Protect > Firewall with the following settings;

-Rule Name: Allow WAN DNS Access

-Description: Allows anyone access to DNS servers located outside on the WAN port

-Action: Accept

-Source Zones: LAN

-Source Networks and Devices: Any

-Destination Zones: WAN

-Destination Networks: Any

-Services: DNS

-Match known users: Make sure this box is UNCHECKED

-Click Save at the bottom of the screen

Configuring and Enabling a Captive Portal for a Zone

Captive portal is a great access control tool configurable on the Sophos XG firewall that enables network administrators to control user’s access to the internet, by making users known to the firewall.

To access the interface, navigate to Configure > Authentication > Captive Portal to display the General Settings.

Since you are configuring a portal that is user facing, click on the preview button to pop up a view of the authentication screen the user will interact with.

The Sophos logo in the pop up can be changed to a custom logo by clicking Custom and browsing for the new logo. You can use the log URL to direct users to a specific page when they click the logo.

The Page Title, header and footer messages can also be edited in the provided fields. The option to change the colour schemes of the page can also be done at the bottom of the captive portal page.

Now we have configured the captive portal, lets head back to System > Administration > Device Access and make sure the Captive Portal on LAN is ticked > Apply and OK.

With the Captive Portal active, we can now create a new firewall rule for users on the LAN zone to access the internet on the WAN zone. Navigate to Protect > Firewall > Add Firewall Rule > User/Network Rule on the IPv4 interface.

You can now populate the interface with the firewall WAN access rules we set on page 26 with the name ‘Internet Access for Known Users’. Set Rule Position to Top and remember to check ‘Show captive portal to unknown users’ before clicking Save.

This rule configuration should then direct any user who is not known to the XG firewall to the captive portal for authentication, before allowing access to the internet.

Below the firewall rule settings can be found Malware Scanning settings, tick ‘Scan HTTP’ and ‘Scan FTP’

In the advanced section set ‘Intrusion Prevention’ – GeneralPolicy, ‘Web Policy’ – Allow All, ‘Application Control’ – Allow All and tick ‘Log Firewall Traffic’ to ensure any users that redirected to the captive portal is logged for analysis.

The firewall rule ‘Internet Access for Known Users’ should now be visible on the dashboard with status turned on.

Since most networks are set to use external DNS servers for name resolutions, and there is no DNS server on the network, users who try to access the internet will not inherit DNS settings from the WAN port, and therefore will not be directed to the captive portal.

To ensure users can gain access, we need to create another rule to allow access to external DNS on the WAN interface.

The configuration is like the one above except the services is set to DNS and ‘Match known users’ Unchecked.

To test the firewall rules you have set, deactivate Allow WAN DNS access and notice a user will be unable to get out to the wider internet. Turning it back on should now redirect the user to the captive portal page, after a warning is displayed prompting an insecure site.

Customize the behaviour of the captive portal by navigating to Configure > Authentication > Services and scroll down to Web Policy Actions for Unauthenticated Users (Captive Portal)

You will find the ‘User request URL’ is ticked by default so a user will be redirected to the page they have requested after authenticating with the captive portal. Click ‘Custom URL’ to direct users to a specific site such as a company website.

By default, the user notification message includes a link to the Captive Portal. This can be changed by clicking on ‘Display a custom message’, which can be formatted in HTML. You have the option to customize your company header and footer logos with images of size 700 x 80 Pixels.

A sample HTML code can be found above which warns the user of a certificate warning before access.

Sophos XG Firewall Backup, Restore & Factory Reset

Now that we are comfortable setting up the XG firewall for internet and managing users in captive portal, this section will elaborate on how to back up configuration of the device, restore and reset the XG to factory settings in the event of a disaster.

Navigate Systems > Backup & Firmware to access the interface where you can perform local, FTP or Email backups with varying frequencies depending on the organizations’ security policies.

Remember that to use Email backup mode, you will need to have set up the email in the notification screen from System > Administration > Notification Settings.

Make sure to assign a prefix you can identify if you work with or operate multiple XG firewalls in the environment.

Since the XG device can become inaccessible for any reason, it is advised not to rely solely on local backups but send backup files to email periodically.

The latest backup file can always be in this interface with a timestamp of the file. Download and restore if the system becomes inoperable.

Bear in mind that any configuration made after backup files are restored, will be lost unless a new backup is taken.

There are scenarios when the Sophos XG firewall becomes inaccessible due to one of many factors. The device could lose power during a firmware upgrade for example, rendering the Sophos OS corrupt.

Navigate to System > Backup & Firmware > Firmware, click on the settings cog on the current firmware version > Select Boot with factory default.

Bear in mind once the device is reset to factory settings, all configurations will be lost. It is highly recommended to have a backup of the current configuration before performing this operation.

Summary

This completes the tutorials for basic configuration of Sophos XG Firewall. Further study in intermediate configuration and advanced configurations are required for network administrators to effectively manage a corporate network infrastructure.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Sophos Labs

10 Privacy Blockchain Cryptocurrency Networks for Data Value Storage

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 23:41:00 +0000

Since Bitcoin’s inception by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, a Blockchain protocol which would evolve to top a record $19,783 in December 2017, it is fair to assume that many new entrants into the Blockchain space believe their transactions to be private.

This assumption is a common misconception, probably stemming from the fact that, data hashed onto the blockchain is inherently encrypted. However, this information resides on a public Blockchain which can be viewed using block explorer and even specialist Blockchain tools such as Chainalysis.

In this article, we shall explore 10 Privacy Blockchain cryptocurrency protocols that can protect data and help you store value securely with complete privacy.

For those new to the Blockchain space and looking for more information, attention will be drawn to where tokens can be found and best ways to store them. Let’s dig in:

1.DASH Protocol (Coin: DASH)

Dash: an open source cryptocurrency that purports itself as Digital Cash. Created in 2014 by Evan Duffield as a fork of the Bitcoin protocol, Dash, which is also a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), uses a proof of stake algorithm with a hash function called X11.

Implemented in C++ programming language, Dash uses the X11 hash function to hash data eleven times, making transactions untraceable.

The Dash ecosystem caters for businesses and individual needs alike, with easy online access and even access at some ATM machines. Businesses can accept transactions for any items or subscriptions across all boarders within seconds.

DASH Tokens are currently valued at 1 DASH = £65.20 at the time of writing, available from many exchanges including KuCoin

2.Monero (Coin: XMR)

Created in April 2014 by Nicolas van Saberhagen, Monero is an open source cryptocurrency network that focuses on fungibility, privacy and decentralization.

Monero runs on an obfuscated public ledger, which means anyone can broadcast a transaction, but any outside observer would not be able to determine the source, amount, destination, or balance of the transaction.

Although dark web operators were initially attracted to the privacy offered by Monero, the community ethos encourages the use of the cryptocurrency for people seeking financial privacy, while incentivising miners to keep the network active using a Proof of Work algorithm.

The architecture of Monero unlike Bitcoin is based on the CryptoNight proof-of-work hashing algorithm, which is an improvement on CryptoNote protocol to produce enhanced security and privacy features.

KeepKey Hardware and ShapeShift.io

-Bulletproofs: These are a type of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof which allows transactions to be verified without knowledge of the sender, receiver, or the amount without the need for a trusted party.

-Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT): These are used to obfuscate the amount sent in a transaction using range proofs and cryptographic commitments.

-Enforced Privacy: To ensure that no users can be accidentally or deliberately traceable, Monero uses enforced privacy by default.

-Ring Signatures: When a Monero transaction is being sent, the user signs the transaction with an input they own and 10 other inputs to give a total of 11 inputs which could have been used to generate the transaction. An external observer cannot determine exactly which input address was used to sign the transaction, giving the sender plausible deniability.

Monero GUI version 0.12.3 on Windows 10

-Stealth (One-Time) Addresses: Monero requires senders to cryptographically generate a one-time address using the receivers’ public address.

Monero is currently valued at 1 = £46 at the time of writing, available on many exchanges including BitTrue

3.ZCash (Coin: ZEC)

Zcash was developed and launched by a group of top cryptography research scientists from MIT, Johns Hopkins, Technion, Tel Aviv University and UC Berkeley in 2016.

The protocol differs from other privacy coins by offering two modes: Transparent and Shielded Modes

Transparent transactions are denoted by the t-address, where the user can choose to disclose some information about the transaction, whiles shielded transactions are denoted by the z-address, and implemented with a type of zero-knowledge proof algorithm called zk-SNARKs.

Zcash affords its users the ability of “selective disclosure”, allowing a person to prove payment for auditing purposes. A possible use case scenario for this option is compliance with anti-money laundering and tax regulations. Transactions can then become auditable, but disclosure is under the participant’s control.

Zcash tokens are currently valued at 1 ZEC = £37 available in selected exchanges including KuCoin

4.BEAM (Coin: BEAM)

Beam privacy coins were officially released in March 2018 and featured an implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol. The whitepaper for the cryptocurrency emerged under a pseudonym Tom Elvis Jedusor (a character from the Harry Potter books)

Beam users have complete control over their financial transactions, with the ability to control the specific information shared and with whom.

The Beam blockchain was built from scratch using C++ language, and the MimbleWimble protocol adopted to ensure privacy and scalability. MimbleWimble achieves this by summarizing the blockchain so only a final state summary is kept.

Unlike transactions on other networks like Bitcoin where only the sender signs, Beam allows both sender and receiver to sign the transaction, using the Schnorr protocol. To further ensure transaction data is not revealed, Beam employs a compact version of zero-knowledge range proofs, called Bulletproofs.

BEAM is available on Windows, Linux, Android and MacOS.

Currently the coins are valued at 1 BEAM = £0.22 available from multiple exchanges including Binance

5.PivX (Coin: PIVX)

PIVX which stands for Private - Instant - Verified - Transaction(Tx) is a pioneer in Proof of Stake (PoS) 2.0 technology and an MIT licensed, open source, decentralized privacy blockchain, focused on fungibility, transaction privacy, community governance and network scalability to become one of the most technically advanced, and globally accepted online digital currency.

Founded in 2015 and originally known as DarkNet (DNET), PIVX was designed to be like Bitcoin core code, with improvements on Proof of Stake Masternodes to provide services like instant transactions, coin mixing and decentralized budgeting systems.

PIVX has some key features that enforce private transactions including Obfuscation, SwiftTX and See-Saw Rewards Mechanism. Source codes for implementation can be found for free on Github.

Currently PIVX is valued at 1 PIVX = £0.20 and available in exchanges like KuCoin

6.Grin (Coin: GRIN)

Grin was launched in January 2019 as an implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol, programmed with Rust language.

The blockchain is open source, private, scalable and aims to fill the gap in private lightweight cryptocurrency networks.

Grin is valued at 1 GRIN = £0.40 at the time of writing and available from exchanges like KuCoin

7. MimbleWimble (Coin: MWC)

MWC is a scarce pure proof-of-work MimbleWimble based coin that facilitates greater privacy, network scalability, and fungibility than legacy blockchain protocols.

All transactions on the base layer use Greg Maxwell’s CoinJoin protocol with confidential transactions and signature aggregation.

The use of natural instantiations with commitments, Schnorr and BLS signatures make MWC resistant to inflation and coin theft which has earned MWC the accolade of Ghost Money.

Currently MWC is valued at 1 MWC = £13 and available on selected exchanges including HotBIT

8. Zcoin (Coin: XZC)

Zcoin is the first full implementation of the Sigma Protocol, which allows users to have complete privacy transactions via zero-knowledge proofs.

The privacy features of Zcoin are achieved using three unique methods.

-Anonymize: Zcoin’s Sigma Technology can ‘mint’ a coin found on a public ledger into a private coin, breaking any transactional links to ensure complete privacy.

-MTP: With a unique proof of work known as Merkle Tree Proof, Zcoin becomes ASIC-resistant and ensure egalitarian mining for all participants.

-Tor/Dandelion: Zcoin protocol integrates Tor to hide IP address and Dandelion++ to further conceal IP addresses when broadcasting a transaction on the network.

Zcoin was developed by Matthew D. Green in September 2016, and written in JavaScript, C, Python, Go-Lang, and C++

Currently Zcoin is valued at 1 Zcoin = £3.32 and available in exchanges like Binance

9. DeepOnion (Coin: ONION)

DeepOnion launched in July 2017 is a privacy cryptocurrency and anonymous blockchain platform integrated with The Onion Router (TOR).

The project is a member of The Internet Defence League and is also a partner of Tails, a live operating system made for privacy and anonymity.

DeepOnion transaction confirmations happen on the Bitcoin network to improve overall security of the network. A hybrid proof of stake and proof of work consensus is used to validate the network.

DeepVault is a Blockchain notary service in the DeepOnion ecosystem, that enables digital cryptographic ownership of content such as art, documents, music, intellectual property and any digital file to be registered on the Blockchain. The registered files never leave devices, and proof of ownership can be confirmed on the DeepVaultOnline portal.

DeepOnion is valued at 1 ONION = £0.07 and available in exchanges like STEX

10. Zilliqa (Coin: ZIL)

Zilliqa is a privacy blockchain platform developed around the concept of ‘sharding’. Sharding is when a network is divided into several smaller component networks, that can process transactions in parallel.

Zilliqa since its inception in 2017 has evolved to become a high-performance, high-security Blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation decentralized applications.

The protocol is written in the smart contract language Scilla, with further developments in the form of ZIP3. Because of the efficient consensus mechanism employed by Zilliqa, mining the coin leaves very minimal ecological footprint.

Currently Zilliqa is valued at 1 ZIL = £0.003 and available in exchanges like KuCoin

Conclusion

We hope this article helps your understanding of privacy Blockchain technology, and the current services available.

Besides the benefit of privacy, the underlying technology that powers these networks have seen rapid adoption throughout the world, with governments and businesses harnessing the Blockchain technology to build complex systems like sophisticated financial instruments, critical data storage systems, secure social identity applications, cloud systems and artificial intelligence systems among many others.

KeepKey Hardware Cold Storage

Most Blockchain ecosystems however, have built-in inflation control mechanisms known as ‘Halving’. On the Bitcoin network for example, this event is expected to take place on the 12^th of May, 2020, effectively reducing the supply of the tokens by 50% and increasing the difficulty in hashing or validating a transaction block.

As always, it is vital to store your tokens away from the internet and exchanges in cold storage hardware wallets, ensuring your private keys and key phrases are securely stored in multiple locations.

Join the conversation on our Reddit group and other social media.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Credits to all organisations and development teams at The Blockchain Foundation

Did you find the content useful? Support the creators

Dash: Xg1znMs8D5A6fcf5JHMrYfYF4THEWJZscg

ZCash: t1KVgT5WhDdJYrc97Bnvm5VuGuas9UUMbsJ

Onion: Ds6mNxJb8zWd5w7hP4EPyZS3n11WaqYeQ9

BEAM: 2b15112198d53e12eb17bdaa6fed88c1cf2e50d26b7503183198416f0e6c5292e95

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Software Non-Custodial:: Exodus Wallet | Hardware Cold Storage: Trezor Wallet

Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Configuring Cisco ASA 5506-X Firewall for Internet Connection

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 16:16:00 +0000

Firewalls represent a crucial point of control of ingress and egress of network traffic to organizations' resources, and configuring one correctly could protect your resources against attacks from the wider internet.

Configuring the Cisco ASA 5506-X device however could be tricky for beginners who may be used to graphical interfaces found in Sophos and SonicWALL firewalls.

This tutorial offered by our partner experts aims to walk beginners through a step-by-step configuration to set up your Cisco ASA 5506-X firewall to the internet.

Topics you can expect to learn include;

- Configuring the Outside Interface WAN Facing Perimeter

- Configuring DNS Domain

- Configuring Default Route towards ISP

- Configuring the Inside Interface LAN Facing Perimeter

- Creating Address Objects for LAN Subnet

- Configuring NAT for Inside Network

- Allowing end devices to ping domains on the internet

- Verifying ICMP to allow pings from Inside to Outside

[Continue Reading] Configuring Cisco ASA 5506-X Firewall on our partner blog site.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Secure Your Crypto Offline with KeepKey and ShapeShift

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all development teams at Cisco Systems and Expert Network Consultant

Microsoft Azure Cloud - Data Center

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:53:00 +0000

Microsoft Azure – Module Introduction

Microsoft Azure Data Center Architecture helps with part of objective 1.1, describing how Azure uses Global Foundation Services (GFS) data centers which is part of the design of Microsoft’s Infrastructure and Networking domain.

The first part looks at understanding Azure Data center Architecture. An overview of topics to be discussed include:

-Azure Data Centers

-Azure Regions

-Azure Speed Test

-Azure Services

-Azure Data Center Architecture

-Affinity Groups

-Physical Security

Microsoft Azure Data centers

Azure data centers are located across the globe with over 1 million blade servers installed. Bear in mind that this number may change as Microsoft pushes to deploy data centers to regions not yet covered by the cloud services.

These data centers don’t just look after Azure infrastructure but used to host other Microsoft services like Office 365, Xbox live, Bing search engine, Hotmail and over 200 other services offered by Microsoft.

Azure data centers are managed by MCIO department which used to be called GFS.

The data centers are available in 140 countries where users can create an account for the cloud service. About 10 different languages and 19 currencies are supported by the Azure platform.

Azure Regions

Microsoft Azure is available in many regions of the world including the USA, Europe and Asia. A list of regions can be found below with more regions being added as part of expansion projects.

Bear in mind Azure regions cover areas not currently listed including China, where only citizens on that region can access. The decision is yours on which data center to use depending on factors like proximity and latency, as seen in Singapore data centers.

In recent times, new data centers have been deployed in regions such as Brazil and South Africa, with a handful of undisclosed government data centers.

Azure Speed Test

Before deploying an Azure infrastructure, a few things may be considered especially if you live in a region without Azure data centers. You can run a speed test to determine the latency between your location and the nearest data center using the tool below;

http://azurespeedtest.azurewebsites.net

This test checks all the blob storage services running on all the Azure data centers and returns latency times in seconds from your location to where those data centers are located. Information like this is vital for making decisions on which nearest data centers can handle your workload.

Azure Services and Regions

It is important to note that despite Azure data centers being available in a region, does not mean it will offer all the services a project may require. Emerging technology services such as Machine Learning, Blockchain, Big Data, IoT and Artificial intelligence may not be available in your nearest Microsoft Azure data center.

To check the services available in various regions, launch a browser and access the site below;

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions#services

Access the table of services available against the data center region from ‘Products by Region’, to assess if those regions support the service you intend to deploy including storage, data management, Ai and Machine Learning and CDN services.

Generally, US West and US East offer the most services in Azure but check website before deployment.

Affinity Groups

An affinity group is a ‘group of nodes’ in the same data center. By creating an affinity group, one can group together hosting services like cloud services and storage services in the same data center, reducing network latency and increasing application performance.

Because affinity groups places services in proximity, multi-tiered applications benefit from improved performance when serving a massive user base.

Azure Server Structure

Microsoft acquires blade servers for their data centers in specialised shipping containers. The modular blade servers function either in the Compute or Storage service role, usually stacked between 40 to 50 blade servers in a rack.

On top of each rack is a switch which are then connected to aggregated switches, to ensure connectivity between a group of racks.

Fabric Controllers

Some racks host servers that function as a Fabric Controller, responsible for functions listed below;

- Provisioning virtual machines

- Healing failed virtual machines

- Rehydrating virtual machines

- Managing health and life cycles of virtual machines

Stamps / Clusters

A collection of all those servers in racks, along with switches and fabric controllers form what is known as Stamps or Clusters.

Typically, clusters are made up of 20 racks grouped together and comprise of the same processor generation, with resources bound to the same affinity group. They are sometimes described as using the same stamp.

A recommended book that improves your understanding this technology further is Mastering Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services by John Savill.

Physical Security

Azure data centers as you can imagine are equipped with the highest level of security, and a thorough security check of individuals are carried out before access is granted to their facilities.

Physical security as you would expect comes in the form of specialized buildings, with barbed wire and security cameras monitoring and protecting the entire premises. Some government data centers are so secretive, their locations are not even disclosed in public records.

Extensive security checks are required for any person to access the servers, usually sitting behind multiple doors and bomb-proof blast doors among other physical access control mechanisms. This as you would expect is necessary from the part of Microsoft to minimize any risks to organisations’ data.

Module Summary

We hope this introductory module helps clarify some of the concepts briefly touched on our previous article Azure Cloud Development Overview.

We touched on the architecture of Azure data centers, the servers used and how they are configured into clusters, regions where these centers can be found, and security measures put in place by Microsoft to prevent unauthorized access to these data centers.

Join us again as we delve deeper into azure cloud development with an Introduction to Networking and Objective Domains.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Secure Your Crypto Offline with KeepKey and ShapeShift

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

Backup System Files Securely in Cloud using Sia Advanced Encryption Blockchain

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Wed, 22 May 2019 00:07:00 +0000

The idea for a distributed blockchain storage system was originally conceived by David Vorick in the summer of 2013. A discussion with Luke Champine over email, resulted in the “Nimbus network” formally released by David at the HackMIT hackathon in September, with a presentation outlining the idea which was now called ‘Bytecoin”.

In early 2014, the project was renamed “Sia”, after the Egyptian god of perception.

The Sia project originally used a Proof of Storage consensus on hosts grouped into “quorums”, that were jointly responsible for storing users’ files, however this model was changed to the Proof of Work concept with code iteration based very closely to Bitcoin, deviating only to improve its known deficiencies and to add the transaction type that enables storage contracts. The genesis block was created on the 6^th June, 2015 at 10:13 EST.

How Sia Distributed Cloud Blockchain Storage Works

If you are not familiar with Blockchain technologies, some concepts may be a bit confusing to grasp or believe can be possible based on our experience of traditional computing systems. The trick is to have an open mind and know that advanced algorithms coupled with unlimited computing resources, can cause some interesting things to happen.

At upload, the Sia software divides files into 30 segments each targeted for distribution to hosts across the world. File segments are created using the Reed-Solomon erasure coding technology, commonly used in CDs and DVDs.

Sia uses this technology to ensure files are divided redundantly, where any 10 of 30 segments can fully recover a user’s files, ensuring there is no single point of failure on the Sia network. This feature means a Sia user can download their files even if 20 out of 30 hosts go offline, representing a truly decentralized and resilient backup system.

Two types of users exist on Sia Blockchain; the renter and the hosts. Before files leave a renter’s computer, each segment is encrypted using Twofish algorithm which ensures that hosts only store encrypted segments of users’ data. This model differs from traditional cloud storage providers like Amazon who do not encrypt user data by default.

Renters on the Sia blockchain essentially form file contracts with hosts, setting pricing, uptime commitments, and other aspects of the relationship between their hosts. No third parties are involved in these storage agreements as smart contracts are automatically enforced by the Sia network.

How to Backup and Host Data on The Sia Blockchain Network

Unlike the traditional backup systems with physical storage drives, both renters and hosts use a unique token called Siacoin that operates the Sia blockchain network.

Renters use Siacoin to buy storage capacity from hosts, while hosts deposit Siacoin into each file contract as collateral. Any file contracts typically last for 90 days and renewed within the expiry window, or unused Siacoins are returned to the renter at the end of the contract period.

To ensure redundancy, Sia automatically moves renter data to new hosts in the event individual hosts go offline, ensuring renters have access to 100% of their data.

As you can imagine, the process to start backing up files to Sia blockchain takes a few steps to first set up your program, acquire the Siacoin, configure your wallets and then begin the file upload process so let’s dig in;

Below are some pre-requisites to acquire Siacoin

· A smart phone with an active number to which you have constant access

· A valid e-mail address with constant access

· A form of identity verification such as Driver’s Licence or Passport

· A valid bank account

· A valid Visa debit card

· A laptop or desktop computer with Notepad open to record details

For this set up we can acquire Siacoin from Cryptocurrency exchange Binance. If you are not familiar with how to use cryptocurrency exchanges, you can create an account and hit YouTube to learn how to buy digital currencies on Binance.

Ensure that all sign up information is recorded and kept safe as well as setting up 2FA for logins and withdrawals, to keep your account and assets safe.

Once your Siacoin is purchased we can proceed with setting up the Sia UI program on your computer and begin the configuration process.

1.Downloading Sia UI Application

Visit Sia website and download the latest version of the Sia UI software available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

After installation, which is straight forward completes, spend some time to familiarize yourself with the Sia UI interface. It is vital that you store your 25 pass phrase seed keys in a safe and secure place, since this is the only way you can recover your account in the event of a disaster.

You have the option to change this password however to a simpler phrase to access the wallet. The long phrase will still be required if you want to recover the wallet account on another machine so keep it very safe. Sia will now sync the 6GB blockchain database to your computer after a few hours.

To change your password, click MORE in the Wallet interface and select change password.

2.Transferring Siacoins from Binance into Sia Wallet

At this point, I’m assuming you already know your way around Binance, completed your 2FA and KYC to allow withdrawals from the exchange. You can purchase Siacoin using BTC/SC pair and access your wallet to see the funds available. The number of Sia coins you purchase depends entirely on your storage capacity requirements. For this set up I’ve purchased 3,165 SC.

Find your Siacoin deposit address in Wallet interface > Receive > Generate New Address. It is advised to generate a new address for subsequent coin deposits.

You can now initiate the transfer of Siacoins from your Binance wallet into your Sia UI wallet.

3.Setting up Sia Storage Allowance

After your Siacoins have arrived, you should see the total wallet count and transaction information in your dashboard. Navigate to Files where we can set up storage capacity allowance in File Manager.

Click Setup Allowance to pop up the storage configuration window as shown below. Notice 500 SC offers an estimated storage of 830.36GB with contract fees of 146.48 SC.

Go ahead and tweak to your required storage capacity. Currently Sia Network offers about 1.6 petabytes of storage capacity running on hosted nodes worldwide.

Sia allocates funds in advance with tokens locked for 3 months, which can be scaled up depending on user or organizations requirements.

Give Sia some time to create the smart contracts for file uploads. Contracts typically complete after 6 confirmations as depicted below. Wait until all contracts are confirmed before beginning file upload.

All status should go green to confirm contracts created and ready to upload by accessing the Files interface. Sia handles file uploads from local drives or externally attached drives via USB or NAS.

The upload process from here is straight forward targeting the folder you want to upload and Select Folder.

Bear in mind that all subfolders and files will be uploaded with the hierarchy structures intact, so you have the option to drill down and load up any folders you choose.

Files are then split into chunks for redundancy and fired across the Sia blockchain network all around the world, with hosts storing the files in an encrypted, tamper-proof format only accessible with the private keys of the renter.

Backing up data with Sia represents an extremely cost-effective storage, secured with AES encryption and performance/cost savings of about 90%. To put it in perspective, 1TB storage capacity on Sia costs about $2 a month compared to $23 for the same storage on an unencrypted Amazon S3 cloud bucket.

4.Setting up to Become a Host on The Sia Blockchain Network

Sometimes in the crypto community, Blockchain is sometimes described as the gift that keeps on giving. Probably because of its numerous functional use cases and utility functionalities. Sia also offers users to earn Siacoins by becoming nodes in the network, and offering their unused HDD space to renters in return for income in the form of Siacoin SC.

Becoming a node on the Sia network requires you to have Sia coins in your wallet to create the storage contracts, that later become your proof of work of storage to collect your earnings.

Add some storage to your host account and flick the switch to announce your host.

Conclusion

This write up is aimed at demonstrating some of the benefits and features of the Sia Blockchain Network, how it works, how to acquire Sia coins and the process of setting up your first backup job. Sia represents a top class defense against Ransomware Virus attacks.

Extensive features and functions can be performed on the Sia network, such as mapping Sia as a drive to your computer and uploading files to a cloud bucket. You may want to bookmark this article and return later for updates.

If you have any questions, drop them in the comment below or join the Reddit community where developers and experts can help resolve any issues Reddit.com/r/siacoin/

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Did you find the content useful? Support the creators
Bitcoin: 3GiVgAMs8eCSHPqCBqGi3xZ4dJMVsKLMFX

Ethereum: 0x6E688D73664260f800214214951389E9582DdaD3

Litecoin: MGd8n8XdGze2SZ9ZexB2mGoC7FHY23vgNG

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Credits to all organisations and development teams at The Blockchain Foundation

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber

How Monaco Crypto is Changing Payment Systems with Blockchain

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 17:11:00 +0000

Monaco is a payment and cryptocurrency platform that operates its own native currency known as MCO token. The project has raised $26.7 million since its launch on the 18^th May 2017.

With the slogan ‘Spend anywhere, without fees’, Monaco offers Metal Visa cards and a premium mobile wallet that allows users to swiftly buy, exchange, and spend fiat and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and ERC 20 tokens globally at perfect real-time interbank rates, without any fees and mark-ups.

When a card is swiped, Monaco will instantly convert an increment of your BTC/ETH/ERC20 tokens to complete the transaction, echoing Monaco’s vision of ‘Cryptocurrency in Every Wallet’.

This article aims to explore some of the features of this Blockchain project. It will also explain how to get started setting up accounts to buy, sell, send, receive and track MCO and the side chain CRO tokens. Let’s dig in:

How to Set-Up Monaco Premium Cryptocurrency Wallet

Monaco is owned and operated by Switzerland-headquartered Monaco Technology GmbH and has offices in Singapore and Hong Kong. A recent acquisition saw Monaco transformed into Crypto.com, when the domain was purchased for a reported $10 million from Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who sits on the board of directors for the Tor Project.

Monaco Wallet & Card App Set-Up Prerequisites

Before getting started, it’s advisable to get a few significant things ready;

· A smart phone with an active number to which you have constant access

· A valid e-mail address with constant access

· A form of identity verification such as Driver’s Licence or Passport

· A valid bank account

· A valid Visa debit card

· A laptop or desktop computer with Notepad open to record details

This set up comes with $50 equivalent in MCO tokens as reward for the first 5 people Only, using code B4P7M48BUH. Begin Sign-Up by Registering your email before installing the Wallet & Card application.

Monaco is clearly a premium Blockchain project targeting the business professional with a metal Visa card. These cards can be applied for based on certain criteria like how many MCO tokens you hold in your wallet and for how long to qualify for the card.

As an example, you can apply for the Ruby Red Steel Visa card when you hold 50 MCOs for 6 months, and comes with added rewards like 1 year free subscription to Spotify. Further details about the visa cards will be discussed further in this article.

1.Downloading the App

You have 24 hours after registering your email address to complete the set-up process. Find a link to the app in Android/iOS from the confirmation email Monaco have sent you to redeem your rewards of MCO tokens.

Once installed, make sure you confirm your email address, confirm 2FA authentication with your phone and set a secure PIN for your new wallet.

Monaco currently support BTC/ETH/XRP/LTC/USDM,BNC and their native currencies MCO and CRO.

2.Navigating Monaco Wallet App

The main homepage of your wallet should look like the shot below, with your total balance displayed at the top and buttons to Buy, Sell, Send and Deposit supported cryptocurrency coins from any exchange.

The settings cog can be found at the top left corner of the app, where you get to adjust various settings like currency to display, changing passcode settings, fees and limits as well as activating finger print authentication if your phone is equipped with a fingerprint sensor.

Information about the types of wallets available, total amount in the wallets and the total market cap of the coins can also be found in the home screen.

3.Monaco App Wallet Interface

This is probably where you’ll be spending the most time inspecting and sieving through coins you have transferred to the wallet.

You’ll find more drilled down information about your coins on this page. Parameters like your total coin price appreciation and percentage rise and fall can be analysed here. Click on any coin of your choice to view statistics and current live values across all exchanges in the world.

4.Tracking Cryptocurrencies in Monaco Wallet App

Although Monaco currently support a handful of crypto currencies, the app has an in-built tracker for checking the trends of over 200 currencies including those you may not be aware of yet.

This serves as a good place to learn about different cryptocurrency projects and what real world problems they are attempting to solve. You can expect more currencies to be available in the future since the Monaco project is still in its evolution stage.

5.Crypto Investment by Monaco Wallet App

Investing in cryptocurrencies can be a tricky skill to master, with lots of hours required doing research on the projects underlying the existence of the currencies. Monaco has a solution to help novice investors in the crypto space.

Crypto Invest by Monaco lets you set up recurring monthly deposits into your wallet account, and manages the portfolio for you. The application lets you set your preferences depending on the goals you have planned, and builds a Crypto-Robo enabled portfolio for you.

There are no set up or management fees and you can withdraw your funds anytime you wish.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of cryptocurrency or any specific provider, service or offering. It is not a recommendation to trade. (Never invest more than you can afford to loose)

6.Monaco Cryptocurrency Metal Visa Cards

The most exciting feature of Monaco is the option to own a card to spend your precious currencies. Visa has partnered with Monaco to make this happen because let’s face it, the liquidity of crypto assets has been a stumbling block for mass adoption since its inception in 2008. Monaco aims to change this status by issuing Visa cards for making purchases of any kind in any part of the world.

The most basic card in the range is the Midnight Blue card made from PVC, and offers 1% cashback on purchases with free monthly, annual and delivery fees.

The second offering is the Ruby Steel card, pictured above which you can apply for when you lock in Monaco’s native token MCO in your wallet for 6 months. You receive 2% cashback on purchases and enjoy free Spotify subscription in reimbursement equivalent of USD 9.99. The platinum card is made of metal and £400 monthly withdrawal limit with 2% charge thereafter, and interbank rates monthly limit of $4000 with 0.5% charge thereafter.

The next cards up are more premium and require staking larger amounts of MCO tokens to qualify, but come with extra benefits and monthly withdrawal allowances.

-The Jade Green and Royal Indigo platinum cards can be acquired when you stake 500 MCO tokens for 6 months, and come with 3% cashback benefits, free Spotify and Netflix subscriptions from reimbursement and free Airport Lounge services. You have a monthly withdrawal limit of £800 and interbank monthly rates of $10,000.

-The Icy White platinum card can be acquired when you stake 5,000 MCO tokens for 6 months, and come with 4% card cashback, free Spotify and Netflix, 10% cashback on Expedia and free Airport Lounging with one extra guest. You have a monthly withdrawal limit of $800 and interbank rates limit of $10,000.

-The Obsidian Black platinum card can be acquired when you stake 50,000 MCO tokens for 6 months, and comes with 5% card cashback, free Spotify and Netflix, 10% cashback on Expedia and AirBnB, and free Airport Lounging with one extra guest. You have a monthly withdrawal limit of $1,000 and unlimited interbank rates limit.

The cards are currently available to citizens of Singapore with a rollout to other parts of the world like Europe and USA planned for later in 2019.

Keep an eye out on their Reddit community for up to date information and developments in the space.

Conclusion

We hope this article helps your understanding of Blockchain technology, and its current rapid evolution and the sweeping changes the framework brings into our economic ecosystem. Monaco have gained some massive traction since its inception in 2017 and have developed a huge proportion of their infrastructure in a short space of time. Find more detailed information and recent development articles on Crypto.Com

The project is an absolutely interesting one that strikes everyone with intrigue for Blockchain. Businesses can also save up to 80% on payment processing cost, by adopting cryptocurrency payments systems with low or zero fees.

Feel free to ask any questions and join the conversation on our Reddit group and other social media.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Did you find the content useful? Support the creators

Bitcoin: 3GiVgAMs8eCSHPqCBqGi3xZ4dJMVsKLMFX

Ethereum: 0x6E688D73664260f800214214951389E9582DdaD3

Litecoin: MGd8n8XdGze2SZ9ZexB2mGoC7FHY23vgNG

MCO: 0x6E688D73664260f800214214951389E9582DdaD3

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Credits to all organisations and development teams at The Blockchain Foundation

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber

5 Real-World Blockchain Crypto Projects to Track in 2019 and Beyond

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 02:11:00 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, it’s almost impossible to go a single day without hearing or reading about activities in the crypto-space since the rise and fall of the disruptive crypto-currency Bitcoin.

At its high, the digital currency topped a record $19,783.86 on December 17, 2017 before plunging back down to the current value of $2,958.90 at the time of writing this on February 27, 2019. You can check live values of all cryptocurrencies on CryptoRank.io.

A boom-bust event for an emerging technology may not be a bad thing however, as observed in the DotCom boom and bust of the early 2000s. The underlying Blockchain technology of Bitcoin has inspired and spurred on rapid adoption of the framework to develop blockchain applications known as dApps, targeting real world industries such as finance, retail, supply chain, e-commerce, social media, utilities management and cybersecurity.

This article aims to explore 5 practical applications of these blockchain projects currently in development. It will also explain how to get started setting up accounts to buy, sell, send, receive and track these digital tokens in 2019 and beyond. Let’s dig in:

1.Brave Browser with Basic Attention Token (Coin: BAT)

Brave is a web browser project started on May 28, 2015 by Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla and inventor of the JavaScript programming language. Brave which is free and open-source is based on the Chromium web browser that natively blocks ads and website trackers, supported on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. The current version supports 20 search engines by default, including the partner DuckDuckGo.

Switching to Brave browser comes with many advantages including freeing up RAM that was required to run multiple tabs in browsers like Google Chrome, which slows your system down drastically from trackers following your online activity. Test users have reported over 70% RAM becoming available to your system just from switching and importing all your bookmarks from other browsers, Brave browser is truly that fast with support for Tor in the desktop private browsing mode.

To further enhance user experience, Brave Software have developed a feature that allows users to opt in to receiving ads sold by the company, in place of ads blocked by the browser. Content users will be paid 15% of the revenue and 70% to the publishers. Users are also able to donate their revenue share to content publishers using micropayment tokens BAT Basic Attention Token.

The incentive payment system works by paying users for their attention when they watch a relevant ad. BAT tokens built on the Ethereum blockchain allows users to tip websites and content creators (such as YouTubers and Twitch streamers), and the tokens akin to patronage services like Patreon.

Notable publishers who currently accept BAT tokens include Washington Post, Vimeo, The Guardian, Vice, MarketWatch and Barron’s.

The future of Brave is to implement BAT Ads, a program designed to pay users with BAT for viewing advertisements as compensation for their attention.

BAT Tokens are currently valued at 1 BAT = £0.3007 at the time of this writing, available from many exchanges including Binance

2.Stellar (Coin: XLM)

Stellar, founded by Jed McCaleb, in 2014 is an open source, distributed, and community owned network used to facilitate cross-asset transfers of value. The project aims to become the future of banking by connecting payment systems, people and banks to move money quickly, reliably and at the cost of a fraction of a penny.

According to the white paper, transactions on the decentralized Stellar network resolve in 2-5 seconds, facilitating low-cost cross border payment services in Remittances, Mobile Branches, Mobile Money and Micropayments across the globe. Read more about their technology by visiting Stellar.org

In September 2018, IBM announced a payment system known as Blockchain World Wire, a Stellar blockchain network that can simultaneously clear and settle cross-boarder payments in near real-time.

Stellar tokens are called Lumens and currently valued at 1 XLM = £0.06327 available in selected exchanges.

3.Qtum (Coin: QTUM)

Qtum is a cryptocurrency that combines Ethereum’s smart contract functionality with Bitcoins security, to create a coin that is suitable for adoption by large organizations.

The technology uses Bitcoin core code and UTXO principles, that operates on a machine running an Ethereum Virtual Machine and the revolutionary x86 VM, using an account-based model. Qtum accomplishes communications between nodes using an Account Abstraction Layer (AAL) that hides identities of transacting parties.

Qtum is Proof-of-Stake based and boasts of a Decentralized Governance Protocol (DGP), which allows specific blockchain settings to be modified by making use of smart contracts. This ensures that the block size of Qtum can be increased without the need for a hard fork.

The project launched in 2017 and aims to become the decentralized applications platform for business and enterprise level Blockchain services. Read their white paper at Qtum.org

Qtum digital assets are available to trade on various exchanges, with the company planning a crypto hardware wallet soon to store your precious coins securely offline.

Currently the coins are valued at 1 QTUM = £1.501933 available from multiple exchanges.

4.Decentraland (Coin: MANA)

Decentraland is a blockchain technology that defines itself as a virtual reality platform running on the Ethereum blockchain. It allows users to create, experience and monetize content and applications. Just as it happens in the real world, users can purchase plots of land in virtual worlds that they can later navigate, build upon and monetize.

Decentraland uses two tokens: MANA which is an ER20 token that must be burned to acquire non-fungible ER721 LAND tokens. Read their white paper at Decentraland.org

The project aims to create a virtual reality world blockchain, where creators can store complex unique game assets, fully decentralized, with ability to manage their own parcels of LAND.

Currently Decentraland is valued at 1 MANA = £0.02981 and available on exchanges like Binance.

5.Cardano (Coin: ADA)

Cardano is a decentralized platform that will allow complex programmable transfers of value in a secure and scalable fashion. Their digital token is called ADA.

The blockchain is one of the first to be built with the Haskell programming language. It aims to develop a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed.

This is the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and research-first driven approach. The group consists of a global collective of expert engineers and researchers.

The protocol features a layered blockchain software stack that is flexible, scalable, and is being developed with the most rigorous academic and commercial software standards in the industry.

Cardano will use a democratic governance system, and you can read the white papers at Cardano.org

Currently valued 1 ADA = £0.03126 which can be stored in their digital wallet called Daedalus.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of cryptocurrency or any specific provider, service or offering. It is not a recommendation to trade.

How to Set-Up Atomic All-in-One Cryptocurrency Wallet

Atomic Wallet is a desktop wallet built with complete security, anonymity and decentralization at its core.

The team is made up of Constantine Gladysh, CEO and founder of Changelly, Charlie Schrem who is one of the first evangelists for Bitcoin, Simon Dixon who develops cold storage facilities for well-known crypto exchanges and Paul Sokolov, a veteran in blockchain development.

Together, they’ve developed what I describe as arguably the most secure and aesthetically crafted digital wallets in the crypto space.

The Atomic Wallet has several differences from some analog cold stores in that, users can move all their crypto assets to the generated wallet. Using their private keys, they can import wallet addresses with existing assets on cryptocurrencies.

This special protective cold storage environment allows users to safely store all their private keys and manage the wallet with encrypted private addresses.

The wallet interacts with exchanges using built in ShapeShift, and Changelly that work with more than 90 altcoins, with daily users of 2 million conducting 15 thousand operations, turning over 60,000 BTC.

Atomic Wallet Set-Up Prerequisites

Before getting started, it is advisable to get a few significant things ready;

· A smart phone with an active number to which you have constant access

· A valid e-mail address with constant access

· A form of identity verification such as Driver’s Licence

· A valid Visa debit card

· A laptop or desktop computer with Notepad open to record details

Downloading the Atomic Wallet App

Begin by downloading AtomicWallet.io - the first Wallet with Atomic Swap Decentralized Exchange. Install app, sign-up for airdrop with promo code XSRD6 and get extra 25 AWC tokens!

AWC tokens are the native Atomic Wallet coin built on the Ethereum ER20 standard. 100 million AWC will be created with 65 million in circulation now valued at 1 AWC = £0.15 at the time of print.

-Once set up, be sure to make a note of your recovery key phrase, a random collection of 12 words called HD Mnemonic Phrase accessible from Settings > Private Keys.

-Atomic Wallet is available on both mobile and desktops, with extended functionality like the ability to purchase Bitcoin directly using your debit card. The desktop version of the application can be configured using your mnemonic phrase.

How to Use Atomic Swap Exchange Engine

The Atomic project was created as a reaction to the numerous security challenges that have plagued the blockchain and cryptocurrency technology — a convenient and versatile decentralized solution for the custody-free cryptocurrency trading. Atomic Wallet platform is based on a unique proprietary engine specially designed to solve its specific tasks.

It can never be stressed enough that, to be sure the token is yours, be sure it is on your own wallet and you have the private keys. Loosing your private keys means your tokens along with however much they are worth will be lost forever as unspent value.

Ensuring the keys to your wallets are stored on paper, five other storage locations and for the security enthusiast, private keys can be stored on hardware cold wallets completely away from the internet.

Atomic Swap is a decentralized exchange, designed to only exchange your locally stored private keys on your request at the point of sale. This makes your asset tokens hack-proof, since the keys do not exist on a centralized exchange that could be inaccessible for whatever reason.

The technology is essentially an automated market bulletin board, where an anonymous user could initiate a trade for certain number of coins in return for a certain number of another coin, at current market value prices.

Atomic Swap represents the truly decentralized ecosystem of the future, where people are in control of their assets and secure their private keys. Software is available for Windows, macOS, Linux Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora distros.

How to Cash Out Bitcoin and Liquidate Cryptocurrencies

Since the dawn of creation of the genesis block on 3rd January, 2009, computer scientists have been scratching their heads to figure out how to liquidate Bitcoin into cash in the real world. This conundrum has driven multitudes of developers into solving this crucial problem.

Thanks to the tireless hard work of thousands of teams scattered across the globe, this seemingly pipe dream is gradually becoming reality.

Crypterium dApp and Bitcoin Card (Token: CRPT)
On June 12, 2019, London and Estonia based fintech firm launched the Crypterium Card and dApp as the world's first global crypto bank. Former General Manager of Visa and current CEO of Crypterium Steven Parker, describes a future where flexible crypto payments take off as fast as NFC technology to become boarderless.

Having launched since 2013, the Crypterium team have been innovating new ways of facilitating cryptocurrency liquidity, and earning recognition from KPMG and H2 ventures as one of the most promising fintech companies.

The dApp currently holds the top coins Bitcoin BTC, Ethereum ETH, Litecoin LTC, USDC Stablecoin and their native Crypterium Token CRPT which is used to facilitate fiat to crypto transactions in its ecosystem. Further addition of 11 currencies are planned for late 2019.

Crypterium have worked very closely with financial regulators worldwide to ensure that the Crypterium Card is complaint anywhere and wherever UnionPay cards are accepted.

The Crypterium Card transcends geographical limitations, with holders able to use cryptocurrencies to seamlessly pay for Netflix subscriptions, order products on Amazon, pay for coffee at Starbucks, shop for weekly groceries, pay medical bills and even tuition fees for higher education.

CRPT tokens currently trade at 1 CRPT = £0.33 at the time of writing available in app.

Wirex Card and App (Token: WXT)
Introducing Wirex app and card blockchain application, built on the internationally acclaimed Stellar XLM protocol and a permanent partnership with IBM and Visa, Wirex now enables any cryptocurrency to interact with traditional fiat systems.

The protocol running Wirex is so advanced, it can handle over a dozen cryptocurrencies as well as a planned 26 international fiat accounts including GBP, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland, Mexico among an ever growing list of international accounts.

Wirex supports popular currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar XLM, Nano, Waves and Dai Stablecoins, as well as the WXT Wirex native token which was officially launched on the July 1, 2019.

In a recent challenge to travel the globe using only cryptocurrencies, reality TV star Alex Hobern succeeded in paying for travel, accommodation and food from UK, Ireland, Canada, US, Hong Kong, Dubai, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Finland, Belgium, and Amsterdam, primarily using BTC, ETH, LTC and Wirex card.

WXT tokens currently trade at 1 WXT = £0.020 at the time of writing available in app.

How to Set-Up CoinStats to Track All Cryptocurrencies

Its all well and great to have your hands on precious cryptocurrency coins in your wallet, but they are only as good as the tools you have to track their performance against other cryptocurrencies.

Remember these digital assets are real projects currently underway, so you need to know information like current coin value, global ranking, historical performance statistics and how much they square up to Bitcoin at any given time.

CoinStats represents a complete package for tracking all your cryptocurrencies and more. Let’s take a closer look;

1.Downloading the CoinStats App

Fire up Play Store or App Store, search and install the CoinStats application. Load it to see the Main interface as shown below.

At a glance, you can see the stats of the top performing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Ethereum, Ripple, EOS, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Tether among others. A 24-hour performance metric and current value will be displayed on this page.

Use the tab at the top right corner to toggle the price in USD, BTC or ETH depending on what you want to focus on. A total market cap of all coins is displayed at the top left corner of this page.

You can streamline your view by adding specific coins you want to track in the Favourites tab.

2.Managing your Portfolio

This tab allows control over your assets by connecting the app to an exchange where you purchase your coins, connecting a wallet or adding manual transactions.

3.Keeping up to Date with Current Blockchain Development

Thousands of Blockchain projects have emerged since the rise and fall of Bitcoin, and with countless events happening each second in this space, its important to know which factors may be affecting the performance of your assets.

The news tab is invaluable for reading about current developments in this fast-paced crypto space. Having current information about new acquisitions, partnerships and even hard forks can positively influence your investment decisions (Never invest more than you can afford to loose)

4.Managing your CoinStats Account

For users who like to keep records for further analysis, you can export a CSV file of coin statistics and sign in if you already have an account with CoinStats. This is not mandatory however to use the app for tracking performance information.

In the event you loose access to your account, the option to restore your purchases can also be found in this tab. The convertor calculator also comes in handy when investing in any cryptocurrency.

Conclusion

We hope this article helps demystify some of the mysteries surrounding Blockchain technology, and its current rapid evolution and the sweeping changes the framework brings into our economic ecosystem.

Feel free to ask any questions and join the conversation on our Reddit group and other social media. Read more details in our article Understanding The Blockchain Technology

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Did you find the content useful? Support the creators

Bitcoin: 3GiVgAMs8eCSHPqCBqGi3xZ4dJMVsKLMFX

Ethereum: 0x6E688D73664260f800214214951389E9582DdaD3

Litecoin: MGd8n8XdGze2SZ9ZexB2mGoC7FHY23vgNG

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Credits to all organisations and development teams at The Blockchain Foundation Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Reddit: /r/Codexploitcyber

Microsoft Azure Cloud Development – An Overview

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 23:20:00 +0000

Microsoft Azure, codenamed “Project Red Dog” and formerly Windows Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft on February 1, 2010 for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centres.

It provides Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Azure was announced in October 2008 and released on 1^st February 2010 as “Windows Azure” before being renamed “Microsoft Azure” on March 25, 2014.

Microsoft Azure Services

Compute

-Virtual machines: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages.

-App services: platform as a service (PaaS) environment letting developers easily publish and manage websites.

-Websites: high density hosting of websites allows developers to build sites using ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js or Python and can be deployed using FTP, Git, Team Foundation Server or uploaded through the user portal. This was renamed Web Apps in April 2015.

-WebJobs: applications that can be deployed to an App Service environment to implement background processing that can be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or run continuously. The Blob, Table and Queue services can be used to communicate between WebApps and WebJobs and to provide state.

Mobile Services

-Mobile Engagement: collects real-time analytics that highlight user’s behaviours. It also provides notifications to mobile devices.

-HockeyApp: can be used to develop, distribute and beta-test mobile apps.

Storage Services

-Storage Services: provides REST and SDK APIs for storing and accessing data on the cloud.

-Table Services: lets programs store structured text in partitioned collections of entities that are accessed by partition key and primary key. It’s a NoSQL non-relational database.

-Blob Service: allows programs to store unstructured text and binary data as blobs that can be accessed by HTTP(S) path. Blob service also provides security mechanisms to control access to data.

-Queue Service: lets programs communicate asynchronously by message using queues.

-File Service: allows storing and access of data on the cloud using the REST APIs or the SMB protocol.

Data Management

-Azure Search: provides text search and a subset of OData’s structured filters using REST and SDK APIs.

-Cosmos DB: is a NoSQL database service that implements a subset of the SQL SELECT statement on JSON documents.

-Redis Cache: is a managed implementation of Redis.

-StorSimple: manages storage tasks between on-premises devices and cloud storage.

-SQL Database: formerly known as SQL Azure Database, works to create, scale and extend applications into the cloud using Microsoft SQL Server technology. It also integrates with Active Directory and Microsoft System Center and Hadoop.

-SQL Data Warehouse: is a data warehousing service designed to handle computational and data intensive queries on datasets exceeding 1TB.

-Azure Data Factory: is a data integration service that allows creation of data-driven workflows in the cloud for orchestrating and automating data movement and data transformation.

-Waves Blockchain Platform : On May 11, 2017 the Waves platform became available on Microsoft Blockchain-as-a-service, integrated to enable developers build non-Turing complete dApps and smart contracts.

As one of the major IT companies to recognize the potential of Blockchain technology, Microsoft aims this integration will help organizations deploy advanced solutions tailored to their needs with little resources. Companies will have the ability to create their own digital tokens, raise funds for projects and manage their own private or public Blockchain using Waves.

-Azure Data Lake: is a scalable data storage and analytics service for big-data analytics workloads that require developers to run massively parallel queries.

-Azure HDInsight: is a bag data relevant service, that deploys Hortonworks Hadoop on Microsoft Azure, and supports the creation of Hadoop clusters using Linux Ubuntu.

-Azure Stream Analytics: is a serverless scalable event processing engine that enables users to develop and run real-time analytics on multiple streams of data from sources such as devices, sensors, websites, social media and other applications.

Messaging

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus allows applications running on Azure premises or off premises devices to communicate with Azure. This helps to build scalable and reliable applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Azure service bus supports four different types of communication mechanisms;

· Event Hubs – which provides event and telemetry ingress to cloud at massive scale, with low latency and high reliability. Example an event hub can be used to track data from cell phones such as a GPS location coordinate in real-time.

· Queues – which allows one-directional communication. A sender application would send the message to the service bus queue, and a receiver would read from the queue. Though there can be multiple readers from the queue, only one would process a single message.

· Topics – which provide one-directional communication using a subscriber pattern. It is similar to a queue; however, each subscriber will receive a copy of the message sent to a Topic. Optionally the subscriber can filter out messages based on specific criteria defined by the subscriber.

· Relays – which provide bi-directional communication. Unlike queues and topics, a relay doesn’t store in-flight messages in its own memory. Instead, it just passes them on the destination application.

Media Services

A PaaS offering that can be used for encoding, content protection, streaming, or analytics.

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

A global content delivery network (CDN) for audio, video, applications, images, and other static files. It can be used to cache static assets of websites geographically closer to users to increase performance. The network can be managed by a REST based HTTP API.

Azure has 54 point of presence locations worldwide (also known as Edge locations) as of August 2018.

Developer

Applications Insights and Azure DevOps

Management

-Azure Automation: provides a way for users to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks that are commonly performed in a cloud and enterprise environment. It saves time and increases the reliability of regular administrative tasks and even schedules them to be automatically performed at regular intervals.

You can automate processes using RunBooks or automate configuration management using Desired State Configuration.

Machine Learning

Azure Machine Learning is a cloud-based data science platform on the Azure cloud ecosystem. Azure Machine Learning studio also supports coding in Python, SQL and R.

-Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML): service is part of Cortana Intelligence Suite that enables predictive analytics and interaction with data using natural language and speech through Cortana

Source: Microsoft

-Cognitive Services (formerly Project Oxford): are a set of APIs, SDKS and services available to developers to make their applications more intelligent, engaging and discoverable.

You can signup for a free account to get started with Azure Machine Learning.

Functions

Azure functions are used in serverless computing architectures, where subscribers can execute code as a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) without managing the underlying server resources.

IoT (Internet of Things)

Internet of Things are increasingly advancing daily, with countless start-ups such as IOTA racing to develop Blockchain technologies like Tangle for the predicted 75 billion devices by 2025.

Microsoft have released a handful of technologies targeting IoT for businesses;

-Azure IoT Hub service announced on February 4, 2016

-Azure IoT Central SaaS on December 5, 2017

-Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Kit (DevKit) board, manufactured by MXChip

-On April 16, 2018 Microsoft announced Azure Sphere, an end-to-end IoT product that focusses on microcontroller-based devices and uses Linux

-Azure IoT Edge, used to run Azure services and artificial intelligence on IoT devices

Microsoft Azure Design

The cloud computing platform uses a specialized operating system, called Microsoft Azure, to run its ‘Fabric Layer’, a cluster hosted at Microsoft’s data centers that manages computing and storage resources of the computers, and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Microsoft Azure.

Azure has been described as a “cloud layer” on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Microsoft Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.

Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Microsoft Azure Fabric Controller, which ensures the services and environment do not fail if one or more of the servers fails within the data center, and provides the management of the user’s Web application such as memory allocation and load balancing.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article helps as a general overview of Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, and the possibilities the service offers in new fields like machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and IoTs.

You can create a free account to get started familiarizing with the interface and tools of Azure.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Secure Your Crypto Offline with KeepKey and ShapeShift

  Learn The Blockchain Technology

  Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

Implementing Group Policy in Windows Server 2016

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:51:00 +0000

Group Policy, a feature found in Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems is deployed to control the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. This feature provides centralized management and configuration of operating systems, applications and user settings on Active Directory environments.

A standalone version called Local Group Policy (LGPO or LocalGPO) allows Group Policy Object management in non-domain computers.

Exploring Group Policy Objects

Windows server 2016 installations come with Group Policy Management as default. Perform a search for the console and launch it. Be aware that just like the past lesson on Implementing DNS in Windows Server 2016, there are a lot of components that make up Group Policy implementation and management.

IT engineers and network administrators stand to benefit from understanding the concept to streamline user resource allocations, management and enforcement of security policies across an organization’s domain. Let’s take a closer look at the console.

Expand the forest to display the Default Domain Policy, Sites, Group Policy Modelling and Group Policy Results. Notice the organizational units we created in earlier lessons appears in this window.

Expand Domains tree and click on your local domain to inspect the tabs associated with the object. The Status tab shows the status of Active Directory and SYSVOL replication for your domain as it relates to Group Policy. If you have other domain controllers on the network, clicking Detect Now will gather information from all those domain controllers.

Any linked Group Policy Objects will be displayed in this tab. Notice the default policy is linked but not currently enforced.

Any Group Policy Inheritance will be displayed here. The tab contains the default domain policy.

The delegation tab displays all users and groups with permissions for containers and all child containers in the domain. You can add or remove more users or groups by clicking the button.

Creating Group Policy Objects in Server 2016

When the Group Policy Management console is launched, you will see any organizational units available including the Group Policy Object container. Bear in mind that this object is not available in Active Directory and any new policies created will have to be linked to the Domain or Sites as pictured below.

Expand the Group Policy Object Tree to reveal Default Domain Controller Policies and let’s begin.

1. Right Click on the Group Policy Object tab and select New to create a new group policy.

2. A dialogue box should open prompting you to name the GPO, try choosing self-explanatory names like Printers or Mapped Drives. We’ll settle for New Demo GPO in this example.

3. Notice an option to select Source Starter GPO. Group Policy Manager has starter GPO templates available which could be assigned to any group policy you create. We’ll explore that feature later so just click OK to create the new demo GPO.

4. Once the new GPO is created, you have the option to link containers which correspond to the Organizational Units we created in our previous lesson. Right Click on the container you wish to apply group policies to and select Link an Existing GPO.

5. A dialog box should now open specifying the domain you’re looking to apply policies to at the top. Notice the New Demo GPO we created, listed at the bottom. Select and Click OK to apply policy settings to Users or Computers contained in that particular Organizational Container Unit.

6. Bear in mind, there are two ways of creating GPOs. The first is achieved by Right Clicking Group Policy Objects > New, offering administrators the tool to set all the policies before linking them to a container.

The second method involves Right Clicking the specific OU container and selecting ‘Create a GPO in this domain, and Link it here’. As pictured below, all policies are applied immediately to the OU container.

7. We are now ready to edit our newly created New Demo GPO. Right click on the object and Edit.

8. You should see the Group Policy Management Editor window open with two main settings for Computer Configuration and User Configuration. Any changes made can be applied to either users and or computers in your domain. Notice both configurations have editable Policies and Preferences.

9. Becoming familiar with all the settings and what functionality can be configured, is a good idea. Expand the configuration tree and inspect all the tabs.

Below are elements found in Computer Management > Policies;

Software Settings > Software installation.

Windows Settings > Name Resolution Policy, Scripts (Startup/Shutdown), Deployed Printers, Security Settings, Policy-based QoS.

Administrative Templates > Control Panel, Network, Printers, Server, Start Menu and Taskbar, System, Windows Components, All settings.

10. Expand the tree to inspect elements for Computer Management > Preferences. Various configuration settings can be found as elaborated below;

Windows Settings > Environment, Files, Folders, Ini Files, Registry, Network Shares, Shortcuts.

Control Panel Settings > Data Sources, Devices, Folder Options, Local Users and Groups, Network Options, Power Options, Printers, Scheduled Tasks, Services.

11. Very similar settings tabs can be found under User Configuration, with only a different in naming of Scripts as Logon/Logoff opposed to Startup/Shutdown for Computer Configuration Policies. A Folder Redirection tab can also be found under the User Configuration settings, which is absent from Computer Configuration settings we inspected above.

Expand the User Configuration tree > Policies to reveal settings listed below;

Software Settings > Software installation

Windows Settings > Scripts (Logon/Logoff), Security Settings, Folder Redirection, Policy-based QoS, Deployed Printers.

Administrative Templates > Control Panel, Network, Printers, Server, Start Menu and Taskbar, System, Windows Components, All settings.

Expand the User Configuration tree > Preferences to reveal settings listed below;

Windows Settings > Applications, Drive Maps, Environment, Files, Folders, Ini Files, Registry, Shortcuts.

Control Panel Settings > Data Sources, Devices, Folder Options, Internet Settings, Local Users and Groups, Network Options, Power Options, Printers, Regional Options, Scheduled Tasks, Start Menu.

12. A section of grave importance and worth paying attention to is User Configurations > Administrative Templates, where administrators will spend a lot of time configuring user settings. A ton of information is available in this tab so spend some time to get familiar with them.

Click on Policies > Administrative Templates > System to see a host of settings such as Removable Storage Access, Folder Redirection, Prevent Access to registry editing tools among others.

To see all available settings at your disposal, Click All Settings.

A Quick Glance at Starter GPOs

On the main Group Policy Management interface, you will see a tab labelled Starter GPO which may contain pre-set condition policies that may be applied to users and or computers in your domain.

Click on the tab and inspect its properties on the right pane. You may find this folder has not been created yet. Click to Create Starter GPOs Folder.

Depending on the server operating system you’re running, a handful of policies should appear in this window. Further customized policies can be downloaded from Microsoft or third parties, however this lab will focus on creating and setting our own policies to affect domain users and computers.

Final Thoughts

We hope this introductory article was useful at explaining Group Policy Infrastructure in Windows server, how to access it, the various components and settings that make up the editor.

You may want to pin the icon to your taskbar, as we'll be delving deeper into using Group Policy tools, to implement structured restricted access control over resources on our network.

Do leave some comments on other ways to perform this task to help other students learn more.

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

Python Programming for Beginners- Visual Studio Code Integration

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 17:05:00 +0000

Python is described as a high level programming language, operating some distance away from machine code structures. The syntax is easy to understand and use, making it a great first language to learn with very extensive integration capabilities and its ability to work across any framework such as web, games, executables and even data analytics, data visualization and robotics.

Python is a scripting language that is interpreted at runtime, meaning the code is read line by line, eliminating the need for resource hungry compilers as you would require in languages such as C and C++. Running codes line by line means any errors in the syntax or code will only be flagged when the program executes that line unlike compilers, where the error will be flagged before the program is executed.

Installing Python Program

Head over to https://www.python.org/ and access downloads. If you have a 64-bit system, it is advisable to install this instead of the 32-bit version as you may experience program crashes while using some higher functionalities. Browse through and download the latest version bearing in mind that new versions of Python 2 are still being released, codes of which not compatible with the latest Python 3.

Once you have downloaded the installer, launch it and select to install for all users, ensuring you change the install directory to C:\Python\Python37 and click Next till the installation progresses to finish.

The installation should complete in a few minutes with notification of special thanks to Mark Hammond, the windows expert who worked so hard and shared his knowledge to make Python for Windows evolve from the DOS platform.

Click Start > All Programs > Locate Python 3.7 folder and inspect the components you have just installed.

Setting an Environment Variable for Python

Part of the configuration for Python programming involves setting up an environment variable. To do this, you need to copy the installation path where the program was installed C:\Python\Python37

Navigate Advanced system settings > Advanced tab in System Properties > Environment Variables > System Variables > Highlight Path > New > Variable name: Path > Variable value: C:\YourInstallationPath > OK and exit.

Test your configuration works, launch command prompt (cmd) and call the program by typing Python. The version of the python code editor should appear to write your first program print (“Hello World”)

Working with Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

Writing code in Python requires tools known as Integrated Development Environments, which interprets the command we type into the console. Many IDEs exist such as Eclipse and Visual Studio Code however, we can also use the default tool known as IDLE from our Python 3.7 installation.

In All Programs > Python > Select IDLE to launch the programming shell. You should see figure below;

Let’s go ahead and write our first program by printing ‘Hello World’ to screen.

Getting to Grips with Syntax in Python Programming

Created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, Python has evolved to become very popular and can be used for the following;

- Web development (Server-side)

- System scripting

- Mathematics

- Software development

The language is so versatile and cross-platform, giving developers the ability to do the following;

- Create web applications on a server

- Connect to database systems to read and modify files

- Used alongside software to create workflows

- Handle big data and perform complex mathematics

- Rapid prototyping or production-ready software development

There are a few reasons why learning Python is a great idea. Among many others;

- Python is cross-platform and works on different operating systems like Windows, Linux, Mac and Raspberry Pi.

- Python has a simple syntax similar to the English Language.

- Python runs on an interpreter system, meaning that code can be executed as soon as it is written. This makes prototyping very quick.

- Compared to other programming languages, Python allows developers to write programs with fewer lines of code.

- Python can be procedural, object-oriented or functional in its execution.

Python was designed with readability in mind, and has similarities to the English language with some influence from mathematics. The language uses new lines to complete a command, as opposed to other programming languages like C++ that use semicolons or parentheses.

Python relies on indentation, using whitespace, to define scope; such as the scope of loops, functions and classes, as opposed to other programming languages that use curly-brackets for this purpose.

Installing Microsoft Visual Studio Code Editor

Microsoft have available an IDE called Visual Studio Code, which can be downloaded and used as an integrated development environment for Python programming, with support for numerous other languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Azure, C++, C#, Docker and many more.

Its free and open source for Windows, Linux and Mac with integrated Git, debugging and numerous extensions available to install and configure.

1. Select and download the Visual Studio Code installer of your choice, launch and Click Next.

2. Check the radio button to add a shortcut to desktop, add VS Code installation to PATH and the folder path for the software files. Click next and install when ready.

3. The installation should complete after a few minutes and you may restart your computer.

Integrating Python 3.7 with Microsoft Visual Studio Code Editor

Once your VS Code program is launched, you will find five tabs to the left; Explorer lets you open folders and files to edit code, Search tab lets you lookup specific phrases and files, Source control tab can be used for Git integration or version controlling, Debug tab is used for running and troubleshooting any problems with your code and the final tab is used to install Extensions, a task we shall perform shortly to integrate Python with Visual Studio Code editor.

Click the extensions tab and search for Python to discover a host of results from various publishers.

Select the option published by Microsoft and install. Click Reload to relaunch the program with your new python extension.

From here, click VS Code explorer > create a folder on desktop called Python > create a new file named hello.py > proceed to write your ‘Hello World’ program, selecting your local python installation as the code interpreter.

Select the option published by Microsoft and install. Click Reload to relaunch the program with your new python extension.

If you run into any errors, ensure that VS Code is set to use your current Python installation as an interpreter. Check the path for Settings.JSON if you run into debug errors trying to run your programs.

Final Thoughts

We hope you found this article useful for initial Python set-up, with Visual Studio Code integration to get you started on your programming journey.

Further studies of syntax, file handling and managing SQL and Mongo databases will be explored in later lessons, focusing using Python for scripting and automation tasks to simplify server and network administrative tasks. Find more useful info here: https://www.w3schools.com/python/default.asp

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation,Python.org and W3schools.com

Email Security 101: 5 Simple Tricks to Ensure Privacy

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 22:10:00 +0000

Email is one of the most trusted ways of communication yet it’s not 100 percent safe. Over the years, we’ve seen many forms of email attacks ranging from impersonation to phishing and everything in between. As a matter of fact, email phishing is the number one vehicle for ransomware and malware attacks. Estimates show that more than 90 percent of all malware is delivered through email.

This gives you an idea of just how important email security is in the modern age. So, what can you do to improve your email security? There are steps you can take to ensure privacy. However, we should never be complacent. Hackers are getting more sophisticated by the day. Here are 5 email security tips and tricks to ensure privacy when using email.

PGP Encryption

Consider using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), also called GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), to protect the content from being read by others. Encrypt everything, including your cached or archived messages, the actual email messages, and the email provider. PGP encryption ensures that the messages are only accessed by the intended recipients. Even the most skilled hackers will have an extremely difficult time trying to access your emails.

PGP encrypts your emails to keep them safe from interception, ensuring that nobody snoops on your business. Some of the information – the metadata – is still left in the open. Metadata contains information such as the recipient, size of the email, the sender’s email address, and time the email was sent. This is unavoidable, but most encryption tools ensure that metadata cannot be linked to the conversations themselves hence rendering it useless for hackers.

Activate Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Set up Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure the connection from your email provider. TLS is a form of encryption that adds security to your email. Enabling TLS is also a good way to verify the integrity of the server facilitating your connection.

When used for sending emails, Transport Layer Security (TLS) results in your messages getting sent securely between your device and your SMTP service. Activating TLS is a straightforward process, simply navigate the settings menu and you will find an option that enables TLS.

Don’t Open Attachments Without Scanning

Often, we receive emails that contain attachments. That’s usually not a problem when dealing with colleagues, friends, or family. However, you’ll receive a phishing email once in a while. In most cases, these emails come from unknown sources and contain files for you to open.

Phishing emails contain all kinds of malware, so do not open without scanning. Better still, only open files that you are expecting and from senders you trust.

Be Careful with Images Sent Via Email

A lot of newsletter providers and malicious sites often use images to track users. The images contain a tracking code which reveals the identity of the recipient to the mailing list administrator. It's easy for them to do that because when you click on the email, the image loads automatically from a remote server.

You can disable the tracking code by configuring your email reader not to load external images by default. As a rule of thumb, never click on links from unknown senders in your inbox.

Use a Strong Password

Having a strong password is one of the best ways to secure your email from hackers. Your password should be unique in the sense that no one else on the service has a similar password. Use a combination of small and capital letters, numbers, and special characters to create a strong password for your email account.

You can come up with your own combination if you’re feeling creative, otherwise, there’s an abundance of password generation tools online to help you do the job.

A strong password alone is not enough, you need to layer security protections. Introducing two-factor authentication. A two-step authentication connects your email account to your cell phone. It creates a one-time password, sent to the registered mobile number, every time someone tries to log in to your email account. Two-tier authentication reduces the reliance on passwords for email security. Even with your password, hackers will not be able to access your email account.

Here are 5 easy tips to lockdown your digital fortress. If your email account is even remotely important to maintaining your personal relationship and professional image, don’t leave your door wide open. Capitalize on the free tools online to keep strangers away.

This has been a Guest Post by our partners :Techwarn.com

Dell SonicWALL Firewall Appliance WAN and LAN Configuration

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 10:39:00 +0000

Running inside a SonicWALL device is the SonicOS operating system, which is responsible for application and traffic management of organisation’s network infrastructure. Below, we shall take a closer look at out of the box configuration of the firewall.

Once the device unboxed, you’ll find a power adapter cable as well as an ethernet cable in the package. Assemble the adapter depending on which country you reside (UK or USA), then plug the ethernet cable into the X0 port labelled LAN with the other end of that cable plugging into the ethernet port on your laptop. Find an image of the rear of the device below. Notice X0 for LAN and X1 for WAN.

To be able to access the SonicWALL interface, you’ll need to check the IPv4 configuration on your network card to ensure its set to acquire IP addresses automatically. In some instances where the device has already been configured with an IP address such as 10.10.0.25, you will need to change your network card address to match the IP subnet of the firewall to be able to access it.

For example, to access an already configured device with an address such as above, you’ll need to set your network card to 10.10.0.50 to give you access to the device interface.

If you are not familiar with how to do this, access Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Centre > Change adapter settings > Right click adapter > Click Properties.

The Ethernet Properties dialog box should pop up as above. Highlight Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click Properties. We can now configure the network card to match the subnet of the new SonicWALL, for which I set 192.168.168.10 to demonstrate the config process.

Make sure to set the default gateway to SonicWALL’s default address 192.168.168.168 and click OK to finish.

1. SonicWALL > Network > Interfaces

Launching your browser, access http://192.168.168.168 and once the log in screen loads, type in the SonicWALL default credentials username: admin Password: password to be presented with the dashboard. Expand the Network tree and Click on Interfaces to see the screen displayed above.

Depending on the model of SonicWALL you’re working on, you may see X0 to X5 or more which we’re going to use to configure our WAN and LAN interfaces, so our internal network can gain access to the wide area internet services.

2. Configuring Static IP WAN on SonicWALL Interface X1

To perform this task, you will need to purchase an internet service package from an ISP. This could be an ADSL or Fibre leased line with parameters such as Public IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, DNS servers and usable IP addresses. It should look like these fictitious parameters below;

-LAN Subnet: 62.319.68.89/30

-Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.252

-Network: 62.319.68.89

-Default Gateway: 62.319.68.90

-Usable IP: 62.319.68.91

-Broadcast: 62.319.68.92

-DNS Server 1: 88.215.81.255

-DNS Server 2: 88.215.83.255

Since this article will walk you through setting up WAN and LAN for internet connection, we’ll be focusing our attention on X1 = WAN and X0 = LAN interfaces and configure them to gain access to the internet.

Click on the configure radio button next to Default WAN and begin populating the details you received from your ISP. Set Zone to WAN, IP Assignment to Static and DNS Server 3 to 8.8.8.8

If you are satisfied the details are correct, click on Advanced to inspect further settings WAN traffic transmission settings.

Leave the Link Speed setting to Auto Negotiate, Enable flow reporting, Interface MTU (Minimum Transmission Unit) to 1500 and tick Fragment non-VPN outbound packets larger than Interface MTU. Click OK to finish.

3. Configuring PPPoE WAN on SonicWALL Interface X1

Some ISPs may provision your internet connection as PPPoE with a username and password. The SonicWALL device can handle connections of this type by your input in the IP Assignment field.

Once credentials are populated, you can click OK to finish. Want to access the device remotely over public IP address? simply tick the HTTPS radio button next to Management.

Be sure to set a very complex admin password on the device if this function is enabled.

4. Configuring LAN on SonicWALL Interface X0

Settings on this interface affect all equipment sitting behind the firewall in your organisation. In a production environment, an ethernet cable from this port connects to your switch and splits the internet signal to all IP enabled devices including servers, workstations and printers.

To configure this, you would have to decide which IP address system you want your network to have. For this demonstration, we’ll be using 192.168.50.1 with subnet mask 255.255.255.0

Just as we did above, click the Configure radio button next to Default LAN and populate the details.

Bear in mind at this point that once you click OK, the status of the SonicWALL will change, and you can no longer access the device on the default IP address. Open your network card configuration page again and set it to receive IP addresses via DHCP.

If your ISP settings are correct, you should see 1 Gbps Full Duplex status on both interfaces. Test the connection by visiting any of your favourite sites such as www.YouTube.com

5. Changing Default Admin Password

For obvious security reasons, it is advisable to change the device access IP and password of your SonicWALL, since these details hold true for all units shipped out all over the world.

As we don’t want to give hackers a great field day breaking into our network, changing the LAN IP address like we did above, blocks one layer of vulnerability of the firewall.

Navigate System Setup > Appliance > Base Settings. A lot of settings are available from this window, but you can go ahead and change your password. To make it more secure, change the main Administrator name to something more specific, a name that is harder to guess.

Further advanced security lock-down features will be explored in later topics.

6. Managing DHCP Server on SonicWALL

It is important to note at this point that, DHCP service can be controlled from the SonicWALL or from your server, if you have one installed on the network.

Navigate to Network > DHCP Server to open the interface as shown below;

Tick the radio button to enable DHCPv4 Server and click Accept to save the settings. This server will now be responsible for distributing IP addresses, subnet masks, gateway addresses, and DNS server addresses to your network clients.

You have further options to control the number of IP addresses, and lease times for those addresses to expire on the client computers.

On the same interface, click Dynamic > ADD to configure these settings > Click OK.

In the example above, I have set my DHCP scope between 192.168.50.2 – 192.168.50.254. The number of addresses allocated to your client machines depends entirely on you but, it is good industry practice to limit the scope to the number of machines in your environment, aiding with easier security audits and identification of bad or conflicting IP addresses.

All devices currently connected to the firewall can be viewed in the Current DHCPv4 Leases window.

A good industry practice is to back up your SonicWALL device configuration to a file, to aid faster disaster recovery times. Refer to our previous article for steps on how to do this task.

Dell SonicWALL Education and Certification

SonicWALL in association with SecureFirst Partners Portal offers Silver, Gold or Platinum membership and access to SonicWALLUniversity.

Membership advantages include access to a wealth of training materials and knowledge training from authorised specialists which could lead to qualifications as a CertifiedSonicWALL Security Administrator (CSSA) and CertifiedSonicWALL Security Professional (CSSP)

You can sit the test at the cost of about $400. Your company stands to benefit from huge partnership discounts on SonicWALL products if one network engineer in the business gains these certifications.

Dell SonicWALL Appliance Operating System Overview

Getting your hands on one of the SonicWALL devices like TZ300 could set you back about £780, a great price for small to medium size businesses to implement network security policies.

For the purposes of learning however, an online live demo version of the device operating system interface is available for Free from SonicWALL

Final Thoughts

We hope you found this article useful as a guide to configure Wide Area Network (WAN), Local Area Network (LAN), DHCP server and securing your device by changing the admin password. SonicWALL represents a cost-effective way to deploy security solutions for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Head over to SonicWALL website for more information.

Join us again as we explore further advanced configurations such as VPN, port forwarding and setting up a failover load balancing for resilience.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Dell SonicWALL

Understanding The Blockchain Technology

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Wed, 02 May 2018 18:38:00 +0000

Dubbed “The Internet 3.0”, Blockchain can be described as a continuously growing list of digital records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Typically, each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a transaction timestamp and transaction data.

This structure makes Blockchain a public ledger of information, collected through a network that sits on top of the internet. It is an entirely novel way of documenting data on the internet, which can be used to develop Blockchain applications, such as games, messengers, social networks, storage platforms, voting systems, online shops, exchanges and prediction markets amongst other emerging application ideas.

By design, a Blockchain is inherently resistant to modification of the approved transaction data between two parties efficiently, ensuring the distributed ledger is constantly in a verifiable and permanent state. The entire framework is typically managed by peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to protocol for inter-node communication and validation of new blocks.

A Brief History of Blockchain Technology

The idea for a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was first described in 1991 by W.Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber. Merkle trees was later incorporated into the design in 1992, which improved efficiency and allowed several documents to be collected into one block.

A conceptualized idea for Blockchain however, came from the elusive and brilliant Japanese programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto in his 2008 whitepaper as a core component of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions on the network. Using Blockchain, Bitcoin became the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem, without requiring a trusted authority.

In the Blockchain community however, there is a general belief that Nakamoto is not Japanese at all, probably due to the mastered documentation of Bitcoin in English, leading many people to believe he may be either European or North American descent. Nakamoto has made the Bitcoin network so transparent, anyone can view his holding currently estimated to be 1 million Bitcoins.

Key Attributes of Distributed Ledgers

The digital distributed ledger network of Blockchain consists of 3 key attributes;

1.Recorded: stored information which is time-stamped

2.Transparent: anyone in the world with required knowledge can see the ledger of transactions

3.Decentralized: the ledger exists on multiple computers in the world, often referred to as nodes.

The Bitcoin Blockchain files size in August 2014 was recorded containing transactions reaching 20GB, growing to almost 30GB in 2016 and from January 2017, the Bitcoin Blockchain more than doubled to 100GB in size.

Money and exchange of value has been a human concept dating back more than 7000 years. Many currency forms have existed and phased out around the world like Cowries, leather and even during the ancient times of 9000 BC when the batter trade was practiced, exchanging cattle, sheep and camels as forms of payment before modern coinage, paper and internet banking emerged.

According to experts on worldwide growth predictions, Blockchain technology is forecast to reach $7.74 billion by 2024, with majority of the future growth in the financial services sector.

Structural Components and Terminologies of Blockchain

At this point, it's a good idea to delve into some components that make up the structure of Blockchain, and some terminologies that underpin the idea of building such an open digital cryptographic ledger.

1. Decentralization

On top of the list of prime ideas fueling the development and adoption of Blockchain technology along with cryptocurrencies, is the ability to store valuable information about transactions, money, intellectual properties and even digital applications on multiple locations in the world, instead of a central point location where access could be controlled by powerful central authorities. This ensures control is handed back to individual users over their creative properties.

A lack of central control point makes the system fairer to everyone and considerably more secure, since altering any data in the chain will require consensus from a large percentage of participants across the network of nodes, to validate transactions and record data in a manner that is incorruptible.

2. Nodes

A node is any active electronic device, including a computer, smart phone or even a printer connected to the internet and having a valid IP address. The primary role of a node is to support and maintain a copy of the Blockchain and, in some cases process transactions. Nodes are usually arranged in the structure of trees, known as Binary Trees. Cryptocurrencies for example each have their own nodes, to maintain transaction records of particular tokens.

Owners of nodes are willing participants, contributing their computing resources such as CPU, RAM and graphics processing units (GPU), to store, solve mathematical problems and validate transactions in the Blockchain network. Transaction fees can be earned as a reward for performing the task in a process that is now known as mining or forging, albeit heavy costs in electricity to run high powered systems.

KeepKey Hardware Cold Storage

Every node in a decentralized system has a copy of the Blockchain, with data quality maintained by massive database replication and computational trust.

3. Blocks

Blocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed and encoded into a Merkle tree. Each linking block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block to form a chain. This iterative process confirms the integrity of previous blocks all the way back to the genesis block.

On the 3^rd January2009, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first genesis block into existence, containing the first 50 BTC block reward and cannot be spent by anyone. The original Satoshi Bitcoin software was released on web-based open source platform Sourceforge and written in C++ programming language.

The genesis block also included text from the UK Times newspaper, saying “03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, a reference to the birth-date of the technology and possibly a dig at the fractional reserve banking system. Satoshi’s creation however limited the number of Bitcoins in circulation from exceeding 21 million BTC.

4. Consensus Protocol

Blockchain consensus protocol is used to keep all nodes on a network in a synchronized state with each other. It’s a system for answering the question “How do we all make sure we agree on the truth?”

The protocol is crucial to the Blockchain technology, by performing two key functions; firstly, responsible for updating the Blockchain network with new transaction information, while keeping participants incentivized, and secondly it prevents any single entity from controlling and derailing the entire Blockchain system.

This technology in a sense makes the Blockchain network a self-auditing ecosystem, making it extremely difficult to replicate or tamper with the network without heavy investment of time, computing resources and an extremely high costs in electricity.

5. Hashing

A cornerstone of the Blockchain technology is rooted in the integrity and reliability of information on the chain from tampering, insertion of fraudulent data or preventing double spending. This handicap is addressed using the process of hashing, where an input of data is turned into cryptographic fixed outputs through mathematical algorithms.

Bitcoin for example uses the SHA-256 cryptographic hashing, that includes a short piece of message or a huge cache of varying pieces of information in transaction blocks.

Hashing drastically increases the integrity and security of data, preventing anyone trying to decrypt the information without knowledge of the length of the hash function, impossible. Tampering with any of the input data completely alters the hash and is rejected by the Blockchain.

A Merkle trees algorithm is used in Blockchain to provide integrity, security and irrefutability. The hash of the Merkle root is normally contained in the block header along with a hash of the previous block, timestamp, nonce, the block version number and the current difficulty target for the math challenge.

6. Proof-of-work (PoW)

The consensus protocol introduced by Bitcoin and used by many other cryptocurrencies, is the process widely known as mining. The Proof of work occurs on nodes in the network, requiring a considerable amount of work to solve complex mathematical problems, and the answer verified as accurate by other participating nodes on the Blockchain.

The process itself involves solving computational puzzles and presenting the answers on a trial and error basis. The answer required for approval into the Blockchain needs to be lower or equal to the hash of the block, known as the ‘target hash’

A target hash is a number that the header of a hashed block must be lesser than or equal to, for a new block to be created. A lower target is usually more difficult to compute and generate a block as miners have to continue testing different unique values known as nonce until a suitable result is produced. The miner that solves the riddle gets rewarded with mining the next block as well as receiving the transaction fees for their work.

7. Proof-of-Stake (PoS)

Proof-of-stake is similar to proof-of-work except preference of miners with more coins in their wallet along with how old those coins have been held there for. Essentially awarding the proof-of-work task to nodes that contain the most aged coins on the network to mine the next block.

PoS seeks to address the issue of the amount of power required to mine a block; as documented in 2015, it was estimated that one Bitcoin transaction required electricity that could power 1.57 American households per day. Instead of using high amounts of energy to solve a PoW puzzle, a PoS miner is limited to mining a percentage of transactions that is reflective of their ownership stake. For example, a miner who owns 3% of the Bitcoin available can in theory mine only 3% of the blocks.

8. Byzantine Fault Tolerance

The ‘Byzantine Generals’ Problem’ states that, no two computers on a decentralized network can entirely and irrefutably guarantee that they are displaying the same data. If the transmission network is unreliable, the computers cannot be sure the data communicated has arrived.

Byzantine Fault Tolerance is therefore a consensus protocol, ensuring two nodes communicate safely across a network, knowing that they are displaying the same data.

9. Smart Contracts

Blockchain-based smart contracts can be partially or fully executed or enforced without any human interaction. One of the main objectives of a smart contract is automated escrow, which the IMF believe smart contracts based on Blockchain technology could optimize the use of contracts in general and reduce moral hazards. The legal status for a Smart Contract is however unclear due to the lack of widespread use.

Blockchain implementations could enable the coding of contracts that will execute when specific conditions are met. A Blockchain smart contract would be enabled by extensible programming instructions that define and execute an agreement. For instance, Ethereum Solidity is an open-source Blockchain project that was built specifically to realize this possibility. by implementing a Turing-complete programming language capability virtual machine (EVM) to implement such contracts.

Available Types of Blockchain Technology

Currently, three types of Blockchain networks exist; Private, public and Consortium Blockchains.

1. Private Blockchains – These are permissioned networks that can only be joined after an invitation from network administrators. Participant and validator access is restricted, and can be considered a middle-ground for companies that are interested in the technology, but not comfortable with the level of control offered by public networks.

Companies will typically seek to incorporate Blockchain into their accounting and record-keeping procedures, without sacrificing autonomy and running the risk of exposing sensitive personal data to the public internet.

2. Public Blockchains – These type has absolutely no access restrictions, where anyone with an internet connection can send transactions data to the network, as well as become a validator. This means anyone with the required programming knowledge, can participate in the execution of a consensus protocol.

Such networks usually offer economic incentives for those who secure them and utilize some type of a Proof-of-Stake or Proof-of-Work algorithm. Some of the largest publicly known Blockchains include Bitcoin and Ethereum.

3. Consortium Blockchains – These can be described as semi-decentralized, in the sense that it is permissioned. Instead of a single organization controlling it, a number of organizations might each operate a node on such a network. The administrators of a consortium chain restrict users’ reading rights as they see fit, and only allow a limited set of trusted nodes to execute a consensus protocol.

Practical Applications of Blockchain Technology

As with most innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, Blockchain technology falls under the disruptive technology category, and can be used to create a permanent, public, transparent ledger system for compiling data on sales, storing rights data by authenticating copyright registration, and tracking digital use and payments to content creators, such as musicians and video production professionals.

Below are some world use examples of Blockchain technology;

1. In 2017, IBM partnered with ASCAP and PRS for Music to adopt Blockchain in music distribution.

2. Imogen Heap’s Mycelia service, which allows managers to use Blockchain to track high-value items moving through a supply chain, was launched in July 2016.

3. Kodak in 2018 announced plans to launch a digital token system for photographs and copyright recording.

4. Smart contracts used in the music industry now means, every time a DJ mix is played, the smart contracts attached to the dj mix instantly executes and pays the creative artist of the music.

5. With rising concerns about information and cybersecurity, an application has been suggested for securing the spectrum sharing for wireless networks.

6. The insurance industry is seeing a huge shake-up with the introduction of new distribution methods like peer-to-peer insurance, micro-insurance and parametric insurance following the adoption of Blockchain.

KeepKey Hardware Cold Storage

7. The sharing economy and IoT are also benefiting from Blockchain because they involve many collaborations of peers. The IOTA Project aims to extend the Blockchain framework to create a permissionless distributed ledger, that utilizes a novel invention called, a ‘Tangle’ at its core.

A handful of white papers on the research can be downloaded from their website. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). As such it has no Blocks, no Chain and also no Miners. This radical new architecture enables things in IOTA work quite differently compared to Blockchains and other Distributed Ledger Technologies.

To keep up with the evolving Machine Economy, it is estimated the number of connected devices that will be in use will reach 75 billion by 2025, with data transmission traffic from tiny sensors on roads and bridges, wearable electronics, mobile phones, electric driverless cars, flying cars and smart home appliances, accounting for more than a whopping 1.2 Zettabytes of IP traffic per year.

IOTA Project aims to develop the Tangle for use by the numerous Internet-of-Things devices, available and connected all over the world, with an incentive for owners to trade data and device processing resources while guaranteeing data security.

8. Online voting systems are another great application of Blockchain technology. Especially in developing countries where vote rigging is very prevalent, an incorruptible voting system built on the Blockchain would ensure credibility of entries, instil confidence in the citizens as well as investors and hopefully promote the culture of accepting majority consensus on internal government policies.

9. To increase interoperability, Blockchain is being used to develop information systems for medical records. In theory, the legacy disparate systems currently used in hospitals and medical laboratories can be replaced by Blockchains.

10. Blockchains facilitate creators to take ownership of digital assets such as games like Cryptokitties.

11. Opacity has developed a private cloud storage system using Blockchain. The technology employs zero-knowledge proof identity systems, to enable a user store large amounts of data with full control. Get free 10GB by visiting their website and trying it out.

12. Data storage, publishing texts and identifying the origin of digital art using Blockchain are also in development.

13. Convergence of Blockchain and CyberSecurity initiative, by IBM aims to explore applications that help to re-imagine conventional approach mechanisms to managing cybersecurity challenges. In the light of a recent surge of system breaches using Ransomware trojans, suffered by huge data collection companies like Equifax, who are actually tasked with protecting sensitive personal data of citizens for use in credit rating, leveraging distributed ledger technologies to this domain will increase security and data integrity levels.

14. On June 13th, 2019, social media giant Facebook unveiled a whitepaper outlining a cryptocurrency project due to release the Facebook Libra coin, expected to be pegged to a number of fiat currencies as a stablecoin and the Facebook Libra Investment Token in the first quarter of 2020.

15. October 25th, 2019 was a surprising day globally, as Xi Jinping Blockchain speech was reported on several global news outlets. In a sudden u-turn about the future of the technology after blanket bans on trading and mining cryptocurrency in the country, China now aims to adopt Blockchain technology rapidly with heavy investments in start ups focusing on the nascent technology.

The UK Independent news paper, noted after the news broke in local news paper Xinhua, saying "this is a swift and significant shift in attitude for a government that, two years prior, had banned citizens from any cryptocurrency related activity including mining.

Reports are also emerging from Xi Jinping, of China being ready to release a digital yuan central bank digital currency (CBDC) as early as September 2020.

The announcement continues to draw mixed reactions from world government central banks and the crypto community at large.

Personally, I would like to see a Blockchain system for domains where all workstations can be trusted to join and request resources from a specific domain, only if the workstations are authenticated and verified member node of that private Blockchain network.

Non-Cryptocurrency Blockchain Implementations

1. Land registration in developing countries can be a great use case for Blockchain technology, eliminating fraud associated with procurement of such assets. As stated by Emmanuel Noah, CEO of Ghanaian start-up BenBen,

“Land is a financial resource. If people can prove they own it, they can borrow against it”.

Frameworks and trials are currently underway in Sweden Land Registry, to demonstrate the feasibility of speeding up land sales and legitimize ownership using Blockchain. Other governments like India’s Andhra Pradesh state, became the first to adopt Blockchain technology in government.

2. Steemit – A blogging and social networking platform uses Blockchain.

3. Bitnation- A decentralized borderless “voluntary nation” establishing a jurisdiction of contracts and rules, based on the Ethereum Protocol.

4. Tezos – Uses Blockchain for decentralized voting.

5. Counterparty – An open source financial platform for creating peer-to-peer financial applications on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

6. Hyperledger – A cross-industry collaborative effort from the Linux Foundation to support Blockchain-based distributed ledgers, with projects under initiatives including Hyperledger Burrow (By Monax) and Hyperledger Fabric (spearheaded by IBM).

KeepKey Hardware Cold Storage

7. Oracle – after joining the Hyperledger consortium now offers Blockchain Cloud Services, based on the Hyperledger Fabric.

8. ABN Amro – announced a project in real estate to facilitate the sharing and recording of real estate transactions, and develop logistics tools.

9. Microsoft Visual Studio – is making Ethereum Solidity programming language available to application developers.

10. Technical Research – In August 2016, a research team at the University of Munich published documents about how Blockchains may disrupt industries. They analyzed the venture capital funding that went into Blockchain ventures, and found $1.55 billion went into startups with an industry focus on finance and insurance, information and communication, and professional services.

The highest startup densities were found in the Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malta, USA, UK and Canada.

Preparing to Program Blockchain Applications

It is a fair point to note at this stage that, in the next few decades, programming knowledge and skills will no longer be confined to the realms of software programmers, but transverse the entire IT industry with system engineers and administrators having to tool up on a handful of programming languages to perform their tasks.

Users who are up to date on disruptive technology trends will know by now that, JavaScript which is the most widely written programming language, will form the framework of a lot of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency networks.

If you are new to programming, a group of industrious developers at W3Schools.Com have made tons of learning materials available, covering over 30 languages including JavaScript, HTML, SQL, JSON, JQuery, AngularJS and AJAX among others to help you get started. You get the chance to practice on an intuitive platform, that displays the results of your code in the browser next to your code console.

Programming Blockchains themselves are beyond the scope of this article, but may be available at a later date when you sign up for updates on the blog. We can get to explore how the Genesis block is created and how data is parsed through the SHA256 encryption protocol, to generate the hash function that gets accepted in the Blockchain.

Microsoft have available an IDE called Visual Studio Code, which can be downloaded and used as an integrated development environment for JavaScript programming, with support for numerous other languages like Python, TypeScript, PHP, Azure, C++, C#, Docker and many more.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article helps demystify the structure and mechanism of this disruptive technology Blockchain, exploring how technologies already in existence were leveraged to create this digital, distributed ledger system and how you can get started on gaining the required programming skills to implement the networks.

A World Economic Forum reports from September 2015 predicted that, by 2025 almost 10% of global GDP would be stored on Blockchains technology.

Professors Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani from Harvard Business School, have said;

“Blockchain is not a disruptive technology that undercuts the cost of an existing business model, but is a foundational technology that has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems”

They went on further to say “It will take decades for Blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure”.

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Did you find the content useful? Donate to the creators

Bitcoin: 3GiVgAMs8eCSHPqCBqGi3xZ4dJMVsKLMFX

Ethereum: 0x6E688D73664260f800214214951389E9582DdaD3

Litecoin: MGd8n8XdGze2SZ9ZexB2mGoC7FHY23vgNG

Software Non-Custodial: Exodus Wallet | Hardware Cold Storage: Trezor Wallet

5 Real-World Blockchain Projects to Track

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all Blockchain development teams at IBM Corp, Microsoft, Linux Foundation and Ethereum

IBM Watson Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 23:02:00 +0000

Developed by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferruci, IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system with the ability to answer questions posed in natural language. The IBM DeepQA project that invented Watson was named after the company’s first CEO and industrialist Thomas J. Watson.

A Brief History of IBM Watson Ai Computer

The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the television quiz show Jeopardy and in 2011, competed against the legendary champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, snatching the first place prize money of $1 million, prompting a resounding applause by the contestants, studio audiences as well as viewers all over the world.

Watson was built to apply advanced natural language processing, knowledge representation, information retrieval, automated reasoning and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering.

The key difference between QA technology and traditional computer document search lies in the way the action is performed; while document search takes a keyword query and returns a list of relevantly ranked orderly results, QA technology takes a question expressed in natural language, seeks to understand the question in much greater detail, and returns a precise answer to the question.

At the dawn of its creation, IBM stated that, “more than 100 different techniques are used to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypothesis, find and score evidence, and then the system merges and ranks the hypothesis”

Recent years have seen Watson evolve with extended capabilities, including changing to take advantage of deployment models such as Watson on the IBM Cloud, machine learning capabilities and optimized hardware available to researchers and developers. IBM Watson is no longer a Q&A system but can now ‘see’, ‘hear’, read, ‘talk’, ‘interpret’, ‘understand’, ‘reason’, ‘taste’, ‘learn’ and ‘recommend’.

Software & Hardware Running IBM Watson Computer

I am sure a lot of people from computer science backgrounds will be yearning to know the type of software making all these ground breaking functionalities possible. Watson uses IBM’s DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework. The system itself was written in various languages, including C++, Java and Prolog, and runs on the Linux SUSE Enterprise Server 11 operating system using the Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.

Watson’s hardware is workload-optimized, integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and built on IBM’s DeepQA technology, which the system uses to generate hypothesis, gather massive evidence, analyse data and make an evidence-based decision. A cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core. In a grand scheme, IBM Watson has 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM.

John Rennie said Watson can process 500 gigabytes of data, equivalent to 1 million books per second. The cost of the hardware as estimated by IBM’s master inventor and senior consultant Tony Pearson coming in at around $3 million, with Linpack performance that stands at 80 TeraFLOPs, accounting for about half as fast as the cut-off line for the Top 500 Supercomputers list.

A TeraFLOP is 1 trillion Floating Point Operations, it is a way to measure the computing power of supercomputers. More specifically, the number of teraFLOPs is calculated by the amount of time it takes a supercomputer, to run a coded benchmark of a set of floating point operations, usually measured per 1 second.

According to Rennie, all content stored on Watson for the Jeopardy game resided in its RAM because data stored on hard drives would be too slow to compete with human Jeopardy champions. Watson’s sources of data include dictionaries, encyclopaedias, thesauri, literary works and newswire articles. Further information is absorbed from databases, ontologies, taxonomies and specifically WordNet, Yago and DBPedia, providing millions of documents and reference materials that Watson can crawl through to build its knowledge.

IBM Watson Ai Computer Logo

Watson’s avatar was inspired by IBM “smarter planet” logo. A corporate initiative of the information technology company that seeks to highlight how forward-thinking leaders in businesses, government and civil society around the world are capturing the potential of smarter systems, to achieve economic growth, near-term efficiency, sustainable development and societal progress.

Some examples of smart systems include smart grids, water management systems, smart-motorway solutions for traffic congestion problems, greener buildings, smart city air purification systems and many more ideas still in development. Historically, these systems have been difficult to manage due to their massive size and complexity.

IBM is advocating a strategy to provide, enable and manage new ways of monitoring, connecting, and analysing the systems, business, civic and nongovernmental leaders are currently developing. IBM will provide the technology and process management capabilities and, outside the realms of technology, to advocate for policy decisions that could “make the planet smarter”.

In November 2008, IBM’s Chairman, CEO and President Sam Palmisano, during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, outlined a new initiative for building a “Smarter Planet”. The speech emphasises on how the world’s systems and industries are becoming more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, and that leaders and citizens can take advantage of this state of affairs to improve these systems and industries.

A follow up speech at Chatham House in January 2010 called the “Decade of Smart”, highlighted dozens of initiatives in which world leaders created smarter systems to solve the planet’s most pressing challenges. The speech aims to inspire others to follow the leads of these innovators by helping to create a smarter planet. IBM announced the Smarter Computing framework to support Smarter Planet on March 1, 2011.

The Philosophy behind IBM Watson

An argument presented by philosopher John Searle that “Watson, despite the machine’s impressive capabilities – cannot actually think. Drawing from his Chinese room thought experiment, John claims that Watson, like other computational machines, is only capable of manipulating symbols, but has no ability to understand the meaning of those symbols”; however, John Seale’s experiment has its detractors.

Real World Applications of IBM Watson Supercomputer

Waking up to news about the invention of a supercomputer capable of processing 500 Gigabytes of data or 1 million copies of books, without a shadow of doubt, sent shockwaves through the entire scientific community.

In general terms, Artificial Intelligence machines operate on a concept known as Probabilistic Methods of Uncertain Reasoning; solving problems in planning, learning, reasoning, perception and robotics, operating with agents that provide incomplete or uncertain information.

Ideas about real world applications for this technology started running rife in the wild and in this chapter, we shall explore some of the brilliant and sometimes awe inspiring ideas currently being implemented;

1. Smart Cities -

IBM Smarter Cities is an initiative of Smarter Planet, created to provide hardware, middleware, software and service solutions for city governments and agencies. The solutions integrate existing IBM Cloud Computing technology into analytics, mobility and social business.

Currently, Smart City technologies serve thousands of cities around the world in all areas of management including public safety, infrastructure, health and human services, education, water, energy, and environmental conservation. Citizens can be part of this technological transformation process, and contribute ideas that would shape perspectives on governments in a cognitive era by visiting People4SmarterCities.com

The Chinese city of Yinchuan in partnership with ZTE Corporation, lead the way in using smart city technology to improve the daily lives of over 2 million people. Some facilities include free public Wi-Fi spaces, notice boards that give to-the minute weather information, traffic and bus arrival time information, facial recognition software that autonomously determines if an electronic gate should swing open for residents, or if security personnel should be alerted for flagged individuals such as criminals.

In this city, a bank of passcode-enabled refrigerated lockers sits beside passengers to store perishable goods, solar-powered dustbins that flap open when approached by a person, self-compacts the rubbish and alerts the disposal company when the bin is full.

For a yearly subscription cost of $40, citizens get a smartphone-sized device that can take 22 different health condition measurements, ranging from heart beat and body temperature, to bone density and blood sugar levels. The device communicates with an app that sends results to the cloud, where healthcare professionals can monitor the data and reach a diagnosis or prevent the occurrence of a fatal health event.

Putting into perspective how much Smart City technology has streamlined the government administration of services in Yinchuan, an average of 14,000 people pass through the five-storey Citizen’s Hall daily to renew their passports, driving licence, start a business or get documents notarized. A civil service process that contains 69 government stamps, from 26 separate departments have now been streamlined and replaced by a single approval seal.

This idea behind streamlining all kinds of government functions and approvals of better services for residents, has seen administrative red tape cut significantly, allowing a new business to be approved in just one day instead of the 25 day wait times previously practiced.

A host of over 30,000 security cameras and an array of sensors use Big Data analytics technology, coupled with updated laws to enforce punishment for bad practices like driving without a seatbelt and using a mobile phone while at the wheel of a car. Water purification systems in the neighborhood provides drinkable water from a tap that exceeds European and US standards.

Examples of other major cities around the world using IBM Smart Cities technology include;

1. Peterborough - England in 2010, visualizng the city systems using data to accelerate collaboration and better decision making.

2. Surat – India in 2014 implemented an emergency response system using IBM technology.

3. New Taipei City Police in 2013 implemented a solution to enhance police productivity and ensure public safety.

4. Tucson – Arizona in 2013 implemented the water conservation system focussed on smart metering and water leak detection.

5. Dutch water management system is transformed by Digital Delta in 2013.

2. Smart Healthcare -

On February 6, 2014, IBM reportedly plans to invest $100 million in a 10- year initiative to use Watson and other technologies in Africa to address development problems in healthcare. Watson’s natural language processing, hypothesis generation and evidence-based learning capabilities is being explored to contribute to clinical diagnosis support systems, for use by medical professionals.

Many partnerships with medical groups, hospitals and cancer research centers have seen IBM Watson being used to analyze the knowledge-base of 1000 cancer specialists in an effort to improve survival rates in countless affected patients worldwide.

3. Chatterbots -

Watson is employed by developers to create chatterbots, to provide interactive conversation engines for children’s toys.

4. Teaching Assistant -

IBM Watson has entered partnerships with Blackboard, Pearson Education, Sesame Workshop and Apple to provide electronic text books offering natural language translations and one-on-one tutoring to students. Ashok Goel, a professor at Georgia Tech, used Watson to create a virtual teaching assistant named “Jill” that answered questions with 97% accuracy.

A research group of Sabri Pllana have also developed a teaching assistant for learning parallel programming using Watson, something which according to surveys has been effective at educating novice students of programming subjects.

Watson is being adapted to address the growing problem of millions of people growing without any education. In 2014, the EFA Global Monitoring Reports; “Students worldwide are failing.. with 250 million children unable to read, write or do basic mathematics and 120 million who haven’t even reached grade four.” Visit IBM Watson to help bring education into the cognitive era.

5. Space Exploration -

A personal favourite idea for the application of IBM Watson is the ability to quickly explore the vastness of space, and uncovering its many mysteries. As boldly stated by Jürgen Schmidhuber, a scientist and futurist widely credited as the father of Ai,

“By 2050, there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt, between the planets Mars and Jupiter” with a further prediction “In a few million years, robots will naturally explore the galaxy out of curiosity, setting their own goals without much human interaction”.

An event resonating with the story told in the futuristic Sci-Fi smash hit anthology series “The Expanse”, set in a future where humans have become interplanetary and established civilizations on Mars, including floating asteroid mining facilities in the belt near Jupiter, using advanced Ai controlled robotic systems.

Schmidhuber went on to say that Ai will have an impact on humans far beyond just taking over jobs. He believes;

“the technology will help humans in the gathering of resources, most abundantly found in space. In particular, deep learning neural networks- designed to mimic the human brains neural connections, and capable of learning by continuous exposure to tons of sensory data- can execute image and speech recognition, navigate and drive through the enormous constellation of galaxies, carry out medical diagnosis and engage in pharmaceutical research”.

Based on existing technologies, a viable and cost effective solution in my opinion to explore neighboring planets like Mars and Saturn’s methane rich moon, Titan, will be to transport advanced humanoid robots onto these planetary bodies and control them from Augmented Reality terminals on Earth, enabling scientists to build critical infrastructure like habitats, power stations, water filtration systems, greenhouses, waste management systems and oxygen generation systems.

Leveraging the re-usable rocket technology from companies like SpaceX Falcon-9 and Falcon Heavy booster systems, essential building materials can be transported to build these facilities, ready years before humans make the ambitious maiden voyage to explore any planet in our solar system.

6. Building Codes -

An engineering firm ENGEO in 2015 created an online service via the IBM partner program named GoFetchCode, applying Watson’s natural language processing and question-answering capabilities to the International Code Council’s model, building codes. Ai computers will give us the ability to write more efficient codes that require less time to compile and as little as 1 watt of power to run.

7. Weather Forecasting -

IBM announced in August 2016, Watson will be used to forecast the weather of Earth, by analyzing data from over 200,000 Weather Underground personal weather stations, and data from other sources, as part of project Deep Thunder.

Climate change has been a hotly debated topic for scientists, with thought leaders on both sides of the argument about whether burning fossil fuels like coal, gas and crude oil, actually increases the level of CO2 and other greenhouse gases like methane, causing our planet’s oceans to rise in temperature.

Watson can provide the analytical capabilities to compare historic data, and help scientists develop more efficient machines and technologies to help save the planet from irregular climate events.

8. Taxation -

Financial services all over the world have seen a drastic change in the delivery of products to consumers. From digital card payment systems to more disruptive cryptocurrencies, the next few years are already promising some ground breaking technologies using Blockchain network. H&R Block in 2017 began using a Watson-based program for tax preparation.

9. Fashion Design -

World applications of Watson can be found in creativity too, partnering with Marchesa to design a dress that changed colour of the fabric, depending on the mood of the audience, analysed from Tweets passed through a Watson tone analyser, and then sent back to a small computer inside the waist of the dress.

10. Advanced Algorithm Generation –

Researchers are constantly at work, testing various tools and algorithms designed to solve large number of problems. Bayesian networks for example can be used for: reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm, learning (using expectation-maximization algorithm), planning (using decision networks) and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks).

Complex advertising applications like Google AdSense leverage this technology to choose what ads to place against user search queries, and the same probabilistic algorithms are used to rate and match players in Xbox or PlayStation multiple player game - Call of Duty.

Watson can help researchers analyze large amounts of experimental data, and simplify algorithms to solve complex problems.

11. IBM Grain-Chip for Counterfeit and Fraud Prevention –

In May 2018, IBM unveiled a computer smaller than a grain of salt. It has the power of an x86 chip made in the 1990s, and contains several hundred thousand transistors. The tiny chip also functions as a data source for the Blockchain network, leveraging the power of Ai to detect fraud and pilfering, along with the ability to track shipments of cargo anywhere in the world.

At the firm’s Think conference, where this prototype was showcased, publications say the machine will cost under $0.10 to manufacture, generates power using tiny solar cells and predicted to be embedded everywhere within the next 5 years.

Doubters of cryptocurrency technologies becoming mainstream can think again, because these chips can be used to build an even larger worldwide Blockchain network, which is a logical start point considering the numerous applications of Blockchain; the most exciting of them being the idea to design air traffic control systems of flying cars and drones in the near future using Blockchain technology.

12. Integration into Advanced Sensor Systems –

As a tool, Ai system integration gives us an advantage to monitor numerous and complex streams of data, which would take humans many years to analyze the information of countless data types and make logical sense to apply the knowledge in the real world.

IBM’s TrueNorth, a so called “cognitive chip”, remarkably resembling the human brain, with 4,096 cores combine to create about 1 million digital neurons and 256 million synapse connections. In a grand scheme, this chip acts like our complex brain organ, operating extremely quickly while consuming less power than typical processors.

Samsung has now adopted and plugged this chip into their Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) system for processing digital imagery using computer vision technology. Unlike traditional digital cameras that max out at 120 frames per second, the DVS equipped system can capture an astonishing 2,000 fps, useful for creating 3D maps and gesture control systems.

An integrated system like this only consumes about 300 milliwatts of power, equating to about a hundredth the amount of power required to run a laptop processor.

Hardware companies like Hewlett-Packard have announced using integrated Ai systems for their HP Insights, monitoring the states of countless hardware located in data centres all over the world.

There is still a lot of research and development required however, to approach the optimal power requirement of the human brain to process information; estimated to process some tasks with 100 million times less power than a computer.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article sheds some light on IBM Watson, what the hardware and software is made of, and how it offers scientists and researchers great tools to develop complex problem solving systems.

You can head over to Watson Technology in Action page, where you get to discover some of the great novel ideas currently being developed.

Do leave your comments below about any real world application ideas in your fields of technology. Exciting times coming ahead as government leaders scramble to readapt the delivery modes of education, to help new children adapt to the changing faces of technology.

As accurately predicted by Gartner;

“Artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on how we will work- some jobs will become obsolete, others will be created, most will change”

We would like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to organisations and Ai development teams at IBM Corp,Samsung Electronics,SpaceX and NASA

Resolving Hyper-V Module 'Disk' Power On Failed Error in VMware

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 13:57:00 +0000

There comes a time when you wake up to find, the virtual machine systems that took so long to build has failed to start up. A perfectly normal emotional response will be going into panic mode about the fate of your precious operating systems.

A sudden power cut for example could render your virtual machine files corrupt and unable to fire up. This particular error in question today pops up an error message “Failed to lock the file, Cannot open the disk ‘C:\Users\Username\Documents\VirtualMachines\HyperV Host Win Server 2016\HyperV Host Win Server 2016.vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on, Module ‘Disk’ power on failed. Failed to start the virtual machine”.

In a production environment where multiple users could be logged into these virtual machines, it is advisable to install a UPS to ensure your guest operating systems shutdown properly in the event of a sudden power cut. Below, we shall explore how to resolve this problem and recover our virtual machines.

Running virtual machines gives us a great advantage to copy or move the configuration files to another host machine or boot the machine up from a previous working state.

Navigate to the folder where your VM files are located and notice there will be 3 files in your folder with file extensions .LCK depicted below. All you need to do at this stage is Delete those files and reboot your host machine.

Once the host is back-up and running, launch VMware workstation and fire up your virtual machines. If the operation was successful, you will see your operating systems boot up as usual.

You may want to carry out some maintenance on the guest OS any Hyper-V virtual machines you may have installed to clean up the disk and clear up crash error dump files.

A good industry practice is to take periodic snapshots of your virtual machines to help you recover from disasters. To perform this task in Hyper-V, follow these steps;

1. Launch Hyper-V manager > Select the virtual machine > Right click and click Checkpoint.

2. Wait for a few minutes while Windows creates the checkpoint which is also referred to as Snapshot in Windows Server 2012R2. Checkpoint options can also be configured under virtual machine settings.

You will see the date and time of the newly created checkpoint in your dashboard to confirm the operation has been successful.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article helps to recover your crashed Hyper-V VMs. Bear in mind, this process may not work for bare metal VMware installations which may require further editing of .vmdk files in notepad to recover your operating systems. This example will work for lab environments built on VMware Workstation with Windows Server 2016 and virtual machines nested.

Do leave your comments below about other ways to accomplish this task and we’d like to thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation and VMware Inc

Implementing Organizational Units (OU) in Windows Server 2016

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 16:16:00 +0000

In the world of computing, an organizational unit (OU) provides the ability to classify objects in directories, or names in a digital certificate hierarchy, typically used to differentiate between objects with the same name (Example: Felicity Doe in OU “Sales” and Felicity Doe in OU “Customer service”). This functionality can be used to parcel out authority to create and manage objects such as giving rights for user-creation to local technicians instead of having to manage all user accounts from a single central group.

Organizational Units can be commonly found in X.500 directories, Active Directory (AD), X.509 certificates, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories, Lotus Notes or any modern directory or digital certificate container grouping system.

Organizational Units appear with a top-level organization grouping or organization certificate, called a Domain. One OU can be nested into an existing OU, creating a relationship where the contained OU is called the Child and the container OU is called the Parent. Thus, OUs are used to create hierarchy of containers within a domain. Only OUs within the same domain can have relationships. Organizational Units of the same name in different domains are independent of each other.

In Windows, Organizational Units can be described as a container object in AD DS which is primarily used to help with Group Policy application and the delegation of permissions of other AD DS objects.

Creating Organizational Units in Windows Server 2016

Before proceeding with this task, a network designer will have to plan a few things about the structure of the organization you are trying to build. It is entirely up to you which organizational structures you want to implement depending on how your Group Policies are intended for deployment.

Three main points can be considered before you start creating your Organizational Units in AD;

-Application of Group Policy Objects – Consider how your Group Policy Objects will be applied to resources such as data shares and printers. This will be explored further in later lessons.

-Delegation of Control – Which accounts have control permissions over network resources.

-Organization – They layout of the structure of the OU objects in AD for easy navigation.

1. Launch Active Directory Domains and Services (AD DS) and highlight the top-level domain which in our example is HyperVOneLab.local. Spend some time to examine the structure of this object tree and notice the Domain Controller label type as Organization Unit with a little icon as opposed to the rest of the objects in the tree, type labelled Containers.

2. Right click the top-level domain and navigate to New > Organizational Unit.

3. A dialogue box should open prompting for a name for your new OU. If you are designing your server infrastructure for organizations with multiple locations around the world, you could name your OU accordingly for easy identification and management. Tick the Protect containers from accidental deletion and click OK to create your OU. We shall discuss the importance of that checkbox and how to manipulate it further down the lesson.

4. The Organizational Unit should look like the shot below with the Users tab and newly created OUs below. Should you have users already created, you can move them to their respective OU folders by dragging and dropping user accounts.

Preventing Organizational Units from Accidental Deletion

In Step 3, we discussed the importance of leaving the tick box preventing the OU from accidental deletion checked. This is vital in the event an attempt is made to delete any of the Organizational Units, since user or even computer accounts could be stored in those locations.

To access and manipulate control of this feature, you’ll need to enable advanced features in Active Directory, Click View > Advanced Features.

You’ll notice your AD object structure has grown in options and this will enable editing of the properties of the OUs created. Right Click on the OU you want to delete and select Properties.

Once the dialogue box opens, you should be able to untick the protection in the objects tab which should now allow you to successfully delete an Organizational Unit.

Delegation of Control over Organizational Units (OU)

Microsoft Active Directory offers the Delegation Control Wizard to help administrators assign specific permissions to resources on the network. Various levels of delegated permissions could be assigned to any resource in the organization, for instance a managing director of a company may request access to special business critical data, while sharing some parts of that data set with the HR department.

A very common occurrence in organizations with very high number of users requesting password resets, very quickly poses an extremely critical security risk to company data because the helpdesk team will need to validate the employee requesting the password reset is actually who they claim to be, and not someone else trying to social engineer their way into the organizations’ network. It is sensible in this scenario to delegate the task of resetting passwords to the supervisor of a department purely from a security stand point. The helpdesk personnel is unlikely to know every employee in an organisation but a department supervisor will most likely have that knowledge. Let’s see how to implement the security feature of Delegation Control.

5. This step assumes that you have already created users and moved them to the designed OU. In this practice example I’ll be demonstrating the process over UK OU with a nested UK Users OU. Right Click the OU and select Delegate Control.

6. The delegation of control wizard dialogue box opens explaining how you can grant users’ permissions to manage other users, groups, computers, organizational units and other objects stored in Active Directory Domain Services.

7. You now get the option to add users or groups for which control delegation is intended. Click Add > enter and search the name of the user you want to delegate, in our example I’m using Jane Doe > Check Names and OK.

8. Ensure you double check this entry for the correct account especially in large organisations with employees having similar names. This delegation gives the user elevated powers once confirmed so make sure you have selected the right user and Click Next.

9. We are now ready to select tasks to delegate to the user. A lot of options are available which you can explore later but for this task, select ‘Reset user passwords and force password change at next logon’ and Click Next.

10. Confirm your settings in the final stage of the wizard. Notice the OU you want to assign delegation as well as the user who has been delegated are displayed in the summary. If you’re happy Click Finish.

11. Congratulations for implementing delegation control over an Organizational Unit. As we discussed above, this makes a lot of sense from security stand point to have a trusted manager in a company reset user passwords instead of the help desk team, ensuring any social engineers are kept at bay from your network. In advanced settings, right click and check the security tab for your delegated user.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found this article useful to help you create and manage Organizational Units. Further lessons in Group Policy Management will buttress your understanding of the concept and how security policies can be leveraged to better protect resources in organizations’ network infrastructure.

Do leave some comments on other ways to perform this task to help other students learn more.

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

Implementing DNS in Windows Server 2016

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:14:00 +0000

The Domain Name System (DNS) is arguably one of the most important components of a computer network and internet infrastructure. DNS unavailability presents all sorts of problems related to finding resources on an internal network as well as external internet resources, acting like a phone book to translate familiar names such as www.google.co.uk to the IP address 8.8.8.8 and vice versa.

The function of DNS servers saves us humans from remembering IP addresses of our favourite sites, translating the names we type into corresponding IP addresses using cache tables. DNS can be described as a hierarchical, distributed database with delegated authority.

This delegated authority means the network administrator is responsible for ensuring internet users can look up an IP address associated with your domain. Some organisations allow their ISPs to manage their DNS for them which could be risky in case of configuration error or system failure which could result in organisations’ resources going offline.

There are 3 main components associated with DNS which will be highlighted below;

1. DNS Servers – These are machines that host DNS databases. Eg Google or Yahoo DNS servers

2. DNS Database – A list of names and corresponding IP addresses to resources on a network or internet.

3. DNS Clients – These are client machines that need to perform name resolution tasks in a network. They will query the server acting as DNS for an address or name resolution.

Knowing your DNS Terminologies

Be aware this lesson will be detailed and lengthy, because a good grasp of the concept of DNS implementation is vital to network administrators for troubleshooting DNS failure. Let’s dig in;

1. A Fully Qualified Domain Name – Sometimes referred to as an absolute domain name, FQDN is a name that specifies its exact location in the DNS hierarchy tree. All domain levels including top-level and root zone, distinguishing it by its lack of ambiguity; it can only be expressed or interpreted in one way only.

Example. A device with hostname svrhost in a parent domain example.com has a fully qualified domain name svrhost.example.com The FQDN uniquely distinguishes the device from any other hosts called svrhost in any other domains.

Many DNS resolvers treat domain names that contain a dot in any position as fully qualified or simply add the final dot required for the root of the domain tree.

2. A Domain Name – This is everything but the unqualified hostname. Using our example above, example.com is a domain with .com as the top level.

3. A Caching Nameserver – These are responsible for storing the results of previous DNS queries for an IP address. Client computers will check the cache of the local DNS server first before going out to the internet to query external DNS like Google’s 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4

4. An Authoritative Nameserver – This is a server designated by the proper authority to provide name mapping for a particular domain. The proper authority for making this determination may vary depending on the hierarchy the server is located.

5. A Recursive Nameserver – This type of DNS server will transverse the entire hierarchical name space to resolve a query.

Bear in mind that a nameserver can have a combination of authoritative, caching and recursive characteristics. An authoritative server that provides external address mapping would usually not allow recursive queries from the outside world. Authoritative servers providing internal address mapping are often caching and recursive.

DNS Lookup Client

Applications perform DNS lookups with the aid of library call functions in the DLL, which in turn handle all communications with DNS servers over UDP and TCP, returning the final results of the lookups back to the application.

Microsoft’s DNS client also provides optional support for local caching, known as DNSCACHE in the form of a DNS Client Service. Before direct communications with DNS servers are established, the library routines attempt to make a local IPC connection to the DNS Client Service on the machine. If no records are found and one can be made, they handover the actual work of dealing with the lookup over the DNS Client Service. The service itself then communicates with the DNS servers and caches the results it receives.

The DNS Client is able to talk to multiple DNS servers with an algorithm that varies depending on the version and service pack level of the operating system. Communication is switched over to alternative DNS servers if the local server fails to respond.

Dynamic DNS Update Client

DNS updates writes DNS data as opposed to DNS lookup that reads data. Workstations and servers running Windows can attempt to send Dynamic DNS update requests to DNS servers.

Workstations connected to a local DNS server attempts to register their names and IP addresses, making them discoverable by other machines by name. Prior to Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, this task was handled by the DHCP Client Service, thus this service must be running in order to dynamically register a computer’s name and address whenever there is a change in system configuration. This can be achieved manually by system administrator or automatically by granting or revocation of a DHCP lease.

Microsoft Windows DNS Server

Microsoft Windows Server operating systems can run the DNS Server service, a monolithic DNS server that provides many types of DNS service such as Dynamic DNS update, DNS Caching, DNS notification and Zone Transfer. DNS notification is implemented using a push mechanism that notifies a select set of secondary servers for a zone when a record has been updated.

Microsoft’s DNS Server service was introduced in Windows NT 3.51 as an add-on with Microsoft’s collection of BackOffice services, which at the time was marked for testing purposes only. The technology however became notorious for incompatibility with BIND configuration files, particularly by lacking support for DNS wildcards and differing in its IPv6 implementation.

Since its introduction, Microsoft has worked hard to improve interoperability with BIND and other implementations like zone file format, zone transfer and other DNS protocols. This made Microsoft DNS the most popular as of 2004 counting BIND version 9 separately from version 8 and 4, for the publication of DNS data.

Microsoft DNS servers support different database back ends. DNS data can be stored on Master Files or Zone Files or in the Active Directory database itself. If Active Directory rather than the DNS server is used, the database can be modified with addition or removal of zones, causing an immediate replication propagation to all other DNS servers within the appropriate Active Directory “replication scope”.

Contrasting this automatic replication with BIND, where if any changes are made, the list of zones in the /etc/named.conf file will have to be explicitly updated on each individual server.

Microsoft DNS server infrastructure can be administered using the “DNS Management Console”, a graphical user interface or a command line interface called the dnscmd utility. Windows Server 2012 features a fully-fledged PowerShell utility for DNS server management.

Common DNS Server Issues

You will notice fairly quickly when the DNS server fails on your network, with multiple workstations including exchange server being inaccessible. You may experience problems pinging client computers inside a domain and struggle to reach any internet resource from outside the organisation.

Before the introduction of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 3, the most common problem DNS servers encounter is Cache Pollution. Although there is a mechanism for properly handling DNS cache pollution, this feature is usually turned off by default. A DNS problem emerged with Windows Server 2003 versions causing a large number of firewalls to malfunction when configured to use EDNS0.

If you suspect a DNS failure on your network, a great first troubleshooting step is to launch cmd and run the command ipconfig /flushdns on the local DNS cache.

You will know it works when you see the Windows IP configuration successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache or Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache message.

New DNS Update Changes Introduced in Windows Server 2016

When Microsoft released the new Windows Server 2016 operating system, computer engineers across the globe were excited to see the new bundled features. Below are a list of 6 new features introduced to the DNS server system when Windows Server 2016 was launched in September 26, 2016.

1. Response Rate Limiting (RRL) – This new feature is used to extenuate the DNS amplification attacks against a local DNS server. Computer hackers can forge the IP address of a victim network and sends a lot of queries to the local DNS server, prompting multiple response from the local DNS server to multiple attack DNS servers. This type of attack causes the network to choke and eventually collapse in an exploit known as DDoS attacks.

Windows Server 2016 DNS server introduced Response Rate Limiting to prevent abuse of the target DNS Server. Once RRL is enabled, Windows DNS servers will first cache the request, check for potential malicious activity originating from a single source IP address, limit and suspend the number of similar responses the DNS server sends to clients from the same subnet. There is an option to respond back with truncation, ensuring genuine clients revert back on TCP, where the protocol ensures legitimacy of client via its three-way handshake.

2. DNS Policies – This feature gives you control over configuring how your DNS server handles queries based on DNS Policies. Scenarios such as Recursion, Query Resolution, Zone Transfer and Traffic Management can be implemented.

3. IPv6 Root Hints – Installing DNS will automatically populate IPv6 Root Hints list in Windows Server 2016, without the need to manually update the 13 root name servers operated by 12 independent organizations.

4. DNS Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) – Defined in RFC 6698 DANE prevents man in the middle attacks on your DNS server by using TLSA (Transport Layer Security Authentication) records to notify the DNS clients what Certificate Authority they should expect a certificate from for your AD DS structure.

5. Extended Windows PowerShell Support – Just like the operating systems before, Windows Server 2016 comes with new PowerShell cmdlets.

6. Unknown Record Support – Some DNS servers have records that are not directly supported by Microsoft DNS server. Records that are not explicitly supported can now be added.

Examining the DNS Domain Namespace Hierarchy

Figure 1: Depicting different DNS levels in the hierarchy

The diagram above in Figure 1 represents the hierarchy structure in DNS domain namespace. To achieve this illustration yourself, Microsoft has a program called Visio Pro that gives you a range of drawing and shaping tools to illustrate network topologies.

We shall now discuss some DNS concepts to get a better understanding of how the system works with all sub-levels to give us the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN).

All DNS names start with a dot which is the root domain and located on the rightmost side of the whole namespace. Remember that with DNS, we read addresses from right to left instead of left to right way we read everything else by nature. The dot is actually hidden so for a FQDN, the dot is assumed to be there so we don’t have to type that in.

The top-level domain will include popular names like .Net, .Com, .Co.UK, .Org etc. which then translates to the secondary –level domain which we create on our local server, in the example above will be ESXiOneLab.Local.

Multiple sub-domains can be created to identify locations such as America, UK, Asia, HQ etc. Having a host serverA in Marketing subdomain will have a FQDN: ServerA.Marketing.HQ.ESXiOneLab.Com

What is a DNS Query?

This is a request for name resolution directed at a DNS server by a client machine in the network.

Types of DNS Queries?

Two types of DNS queries exist;

-Iterative – In this type of query, the DNS server attempts to resolve the request based on what information is currently possesses.

-Recursive – This type of query attempts to resolve the request based on what information it has in its record, but will go further to research the intended address and give you an answer when it gets one from other DNS servers.

DNS servers can be either Authoritative which means they will resolve your query or say ‘No’, or non-authoritative which uses the DNS cache or forwarders which may be authoritative.

DNS Forwarders

These are simply DNS servers to which other DNS servers forward their queries for an address resolution.

Types of DNS Forwarders

Two main types of DNS forwarders exist;

Standard - are set to check their table and respond if they have an answer or forward to other DNS servers for a resolution.

Conditional – are set to check their table for a response and if not found, forward the request to a specific DNS server for a resolution.

When a client computer sends a request for resolution of ESXiOneLab.Com for example, to a local DNS server, a recursive query is sent and when an answer cannot be found, the local DNS sends another recursive query to a Forward DNS server.

Once received, the server sends an iterative query to the various Root DNS server, .Com DNS server and the DNS server actually carrying the record of ESXiOneLab.Com. The IP addresses is then acquired and sent back to the local DNS server where the client computer that requested it can now access the resources on that domain like a webpage.

Conditional forwarding differs from standard in the sense that, when the client computer sends the request, a forward DNS server already configured on the local server with the IP address of ESXiOneLab.Com will be sent this request for resolution.

DNS Zones

A zone is an area of DNS namespace for which the DNS server is authoritative over. There are a few types of DNS zones;

1. A Primary DNS Zone- contains a master copy of the database and has permission to read and write.

2. A Secondary DNS Zone- contains a read only copy of the database and serves as a look up table which cannot be updated.

3. Stub DNS Zone- DNS allows for delegations where another DNS server can be delegated the authority over a sub-domain. Stub zones function by allowing automatic propagation of delegations to DNS servers.

4. Forward Lookup Zone- This takes the queried name and resolves it into the corresponding IP address.

5. Reverse Lookup Zone- Does the opposite by resolving the IP address into the corresponding name of the target computer or resource.

6. Dynamic Updates- This enables a DNS server to automatically update its cache with new information about any client computer joining the network becomes available. This information used to manually be updated system administrators.

7. Active Directory Integrated- This is comes as part of the DNS server role installation in Active Directory Domain Services. The database files are not stored on a server but stored and replicated instantly as part of the Active Directory database.

Advantages of Active Directory Integrated DNS Zones

Implementing Active Directory Integrated zones comes with some benefits since the database is stored and replicated with Active Directory database itself. Below are some implementation advantages;

-Multimaster Replication

-Streamline Data Replication

-Backwards compatible to Secondary Zones

-Secure Dynamic Updates – only applies to clients joined to the domain

DNS Records

DNS records are stored in the database and used for different purposes;

-A (Host) – Host record is the most basic forward look up record. AAAA records are used in IPv6

-PTR (Pointer) – Reverse look up record of IP addresses into names

-SOA (Start of Authority) – Holds authority over a DNS zone

-SRV (Service Locator) - This helps point clients on a domain to a service such as domain controllers

-NS (Name Server) – The names of other DNS servers

-MX (Mail Exchanger) - Points to an email server namespace record

-CNAME (Alias) – Known as canonical name record or alias for a resource such as a web server

DNS Zone Transfers

These were used in Standard Zones and how information is transferred from Primary master read-write copy of the database to a Secondary read-only copy. Two types exist known as AXFR (Full Transfer) and IXFR (Incremental Transfer). Zone transfers are not used in Active Directory Integrated Zones.

Be aware that Zone Transfers pose a serious security risk, exploited by hackers in an attack where a transfer is sent to secondary DNS zones or server with malicious information.

Installing and Configuring DNS in Windows Server 2016

Once you have installed and activated Windows 2016. DNS can be installed as part of a role when you install Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). You can go back to the procedure in our previous lesson, Installingand Configuring Windows Server 2012 if you are not familiar with this set up.

After your installation is complete and you have promoted the server to a domain controller, there are a few tasks required to configure your domain using a new forest if it’s the only DNS server available.

1. As industry practice, you can make some changes to your network card by accessing Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Change Adapter Settings > Right Click for the Properties of that card. Select the IPv4 settings and click properties. If you haven’t already done so, set the IP address of the DC as static.

Since our domain controller also now acts as our local DNS server, specify the same IP address in the preferred DNS section as shown below. This ensure any queries are directed to this local DNS first before attempting to send the request to other external DNS servers for resolution.

2. If your domain creation was successful, the server will reboot and give you the option to log into the domain account. Our lab here will be using HyperVOneLab.Local and DC IP address 192.168.0.25 throughout this demonstration. Remember you can choose any private IP range for your network.

Click Start > Administrative Tools > Launch DNS Manager.

Notice the newly promoted DC/DNS server name appear at the top with Forward Lookup Zones, Reverse Lookup Zones, Trust Points, Conditional Forwarders, Root Hints and Forwarders objects in the DNS tree.

3. Right Click the server and familiarise yourself with the options available. Select Properties.

4. The Interfaces tab is where you can select the IP addresses that will serve DNS requests. You can limit the IP address your DNS server listens on or set it to listen on All IP addresses.

5. The next tab is DNS Forwarders which contains a list of other DNS servers capable of resolving client requests in the event your local DNS has no record of the resource query. In this example we can input the external Google DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 Tick Use root hints if no forwarders are available and click Apply.

6. The Advanced tab shows the server version number as well as server options. The option to load zone data on start is set by default to load from Active Directory and registry. Settings for scavenging stale DNS records can also be set in this window.

7. Root hints tab contains a list of Name servers which are used to resolve queries for zones that do not exist on the local DNS server. This action only happens if the forwarders are not configured or fail to respond.

8. The Debug Logging tab is disabled by default. You get the ability to record packets sent and received by the DNS server to a log file. The information could be useful for network security audit procedures.

9. Choose how you would like to log DNS events. All events logging is active by default. You can set your server to log errors and warnings or no events at all which is not recommended from a security view point.

10. Microsoft DNS lets you verify the configuration of the server by performing manual or automatic testing. A simple query against the DNS server or recursive query can be tested in this tab.

11. The last Security tab lets you assign read/write and full control permissions to the domain administrators. Inspect and ensure no unauthorized accounts have control over this zone.

12. Expand the Forward Lookup Zone and select YourDomain.Local to display the details in that database. Notice your server IP address listed against Host (A) with a corresponding IPv6 address against the (AAAA) zone file type.

13. Right click the Primary local zone and select properties. New DNS zone file records like MX, CNAME, DNSSEC options and Aliases can be created here.

14. Let’s explore the properties of the local DNS looking at the General tab. The status, Active Directory Integrated DNS type and replication can be viewed here along with the setting for Dynamic updates.

15. Start of Authority tab shows your DC/DNS which now holds authority over the domain.

16. The Name Servers tab shows the server Fully Qualified Domain Name and corresponding IP address which can communicate with this domain. This could be important when creating a secondary DNS zone on another DNS server as a read only copy to replicate the records from the Primary zone.

17. As we discussed earlier, the Zone Transfer tab allows you to specify whether your local DNS server transfers a copy of the zone to servers that request for it. For security reasons, set this Only servers listed in the Name Servers tab.

18. A network administrator may want to create a secondary DNS server essentially acting as a read-only copy of the Primary. To do this, right lick and select New Zone on the second server and run through the set up wizard.

19. The next screen gives you the option to select the zone type; Secondary selected in this case creates a copy of the zone that exists on another server, our Primary server. This configuration helps balance the processing load of primary servers and provides fault tolerance if DNS fails to respond.

20. Select whether you prefer this server to perform forward or reverse lookups.

21. Give the new DNS zone a name and finish to create the secondary DNS zone.

22. To test your DNS configuration has been successful. Open the network settings and notice the Ethernet status now shows YourDomain.Local

Final Thoughts

This article is intended as a guide to explaining the basic concepts and configuration of a local DNS server. Try pinging the domain controller from another machine on the network or spin up an Exchange virtual machine instance and try to join the new domain.

Bear in mind DNS is a very broad topic with advanced concepts to learn once the network topologies start to increase in complexity.

Do leave some comments on other ways to perform this task to help other students learn more.

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

Installing & Configuring Hyper-V Virtualization in Windows Server 2016

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 16:51:00 +0000

Codenamed Viridian and formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V is a native hypervisor which can create virtual machines on x86 and 64-bit systems running Windows operating systems.

The hypervisor was introduced with Windows 8 to supersede Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization engine of client editions of Windows NT family. A server running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individually built virtual machines to one or more networks.

Hyper-V was released along side Windows Server 2008, available free of charge for all Windows Server and some client operating systems such as Windows 10.

A single license will give you the option to install one host and two virtual machines. Eg. Win Server 2016 host, 1 DC virtual machine and 1 virtual machine for Microsoft Exchange program and services. It represents a cost-effective way of deploying server infrastructure for small to medium sized businesses.

Preparing to Install Hyper-V Role in Server 2016

To perform this task, you will need a licensed version of Windows Server 2016 Standard or above to take full advantage of the capabilities of the hypervisor. If you are not familiar with how to install the operating system, refer to our previous article on Installing and Config of Windows Server 2012 R2.

Once you have installed and activated Windows 2016. Follow the steps below to install Hyper-V role.

1. Launch Server Manager and Click Add Roles and Features. Alternative as before you can click on the Manage Tab in the top right corner > Add Roles and Features.

2. Select the tick box for Hyper-V and add any other dependencies like Hyper-V management tools for installation. Leave the .Net settings intact and Click Next.

3. The next stage displays your network switches and the option to create Virtual Switches for the Hyper-V host. You can leave this unticked to be configured later. Microsoft recommends you leave one network switch reserved for remote access.

4. Have a read about the ability to configure the server to receive live migrations on the network. Leave these as default as we can configure them later and Click Next.

5. The Default Stores shows you the location of your Virtual Hard Disks and the location of your virtual machine configuration files. You may browse and alter the path to these locations and Click Next.

6. We can now double check all the services and tools for Hyper-V and Click Install when ready.

7. Monitor the progress of the installation for any errors. Once successful, a reboot will be required to complete the installation of Hyper-V 2016 on your Windows 2016 Server operating system.

8. You may notice a few new changes once your server comes back online. The Server Manager will have a Hyper-V object appear on the left menu where virtual machine statuses can be checked.

9. Congratulations on installing Windows Hyper-V. For easy accessibility, you may want to click Start > Windows Administrative Tools > Locate Hyper-V Manager > Launch. This will start the manager interface which you can pin to your taskbar as it will be frequently required during VM creations.

10. Spend some time familiarizing yourself with the Hyper-V Manager interface. Notice host name on the left pane and a whole host of actions available on the right pane.

Some of these functions such as Import Virtual Machine, Hyper-V Settings, Virtual Switch Manager, Virtual SAN Manager, Edit Disk, Inspect Disk, Stop Service and Remove Server will be explored further to build our virtual machine environment with networking functionalities.

Creating Virtual Machines in Hyper-V Manager 2016

Looking back at our last step above, you’ll notice the virtual machines has no active machines currently running. This chapter will explore the process involved to spin up two new virtual machines which come free of license when you purchase the key for Windows Server operating system.

11. Right Click on the host on the left of the Hyper-V Manager > New > Virtual Machine.

12. The new virtual machine set up wizard should now appear as a guide for VM initial configuration.

13. You get to name your virtual machine at this stage. Remember to choose an easy to identify name for instance if you plan to have a domain controller and exchange installed as separate servers, you can add DC and EXCH to the end of your names to signify the functions they intend to perform.

14. The next step takes you to a new feature introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2 with two Hyper-V Boot Architectures. First boot mode is Hyper-V BIOS and the second Hyper-V Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

Generation 1 supports legacy drivers, both 32bit/64bit OS and can initialize IDE controllers, while generation 2 supports 64bit Win Server 2012 R2 or later. Settings cannot be changed once selected.

15. It is time to assign some RAM for your new VMs to run. The amount of memory you assign entirely depends on what the machine is going to be doing. For the purposes of this lab, I have assigned 2048MB to my domain controller (DC). A new feature introduced by Microsoft lets you select to use Dynamic Memory for virtual machines should they require more than specified. Click Next.

16. Some of you may have selected the network card on your host when installing the Hyper-V role, drop down the menu and choose that NIC if available. We can still configure this later before our virtual machines are fired up so Click Next to continue.

17. Connect virtual machine to virtual hard disk at this stage. Notice the new extension .vhdx from previous versions .vhd in Windows Server 2008R2. You can browse to the location of the virtual hard disk or browse to change the location of storage. Use existing virtual disk if you have one or attach a virtual disk later.

18. Just as we did in previous installations of virtual machines, choose to install OS later or browse to the location where the .ISO file is held and Click Next.

19. Check the settings summary of your virtual machine and go back to change anything you are not happy with. Once satisfied everything is set, Click Finish.

20. Congratulations! Your first virtual machine in Hyper-V 2016 is ready. Notice the new machine now appears in the dashboard with added functions located at the bottom right of the Manager screen.

Some final touches will be performed in the next steps before we can fire up our virtual machine.

Configuring a Virtual Switch in Hyper-V Manager 2016

Those that missed out on configuring initial NIC in Step 16 for your Hyper-V server, do not despair. The next few steps will demonstrate how you can configure virtual network switches and expose you to the different types of virtual switches available. Advanced configurations will be explored in later lessons.
21. Launch the Virtual Switch Manager on the right pane of the screen, alternatively Right Click on the host and select switch manager.

22. Once launched, you will see the three types of virtual switches you can create; External, Internal and Private virtual switches. Select External and Click Create Virtual Switch to begin.

23. Give the External switch a name and select the Network Interface Card in the drop-down menu. Click Apply and get a prompt about pending network changes. Click Yes to save the changes.

24. The last step involves assigning the newly created External Virtual Switch to your network adapter settings. Right Click the Hyper-V VM and select Settings to see the tab below. Navigate to Network adapter and assign the External Virtual Switch we just created above.

25. You can now fire up your virtual machine. This can be achieved several ways; Right Click > Start or Action > Start or Click on Start at the bottom right pane of your screen. Observe the state of the virtual machine change from OFF to Running and an activity monitor at the bottom left of your screen.

To expand what is happening on the virtual machine, Right Click and select Connect. You can then resize the screen to suit your preference or even enter full screen mode. Install Server 2016 as usual.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article has helped shed some light on how Microsoft's hypervisor works and how to build one for yourself. More advanced configurations are available when you decide to build clusters of these virtual machines. Don't forget to access Microsoft's website for more advanced training courses and always and always practice these technologies in your own home lab.

Do leave some comments on other ways to perform this task to help other students learn more about server virtualization.

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

HP Aruba 2530 Network Switch VLAN Configuration

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 17:02:00 +0000

What is VLAN?

A virtual Local Area Network can be described as any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated at the data link layer (OSI layer 2) of a computer network. Virtual in the context refers to physical network objects altered or recreated using additional programming logic.

VLAN works by applying tags to network packets and managing the handling of these tags in the network, creating the appearance and functionality of network traffic split between separate networks on the same physical switch.

Advantages of using this technology includes simplicity of networks without the need for multiple cable runs, traffic management, security and cheaper to implement without buying multiple switches.

Precautions are required to prevent an exploit called VLAN hopping, where traffic can “escape” a given VLAN.

More sophisticated switches can mark data frames through VLAN tagging, enabling a single interconnect (Trunk) to transport data to multiple VLANs. Since VLANs share common bandwidth, a VLAN trunk utilizes link aggregation, Quality-of-Service (QoS) prioritization or both to route data efficiently.

VLANs is useful for partitioning a local network into several distinctive segments, for instance;

· Voice over IP

· Network management

· Storage area network (SAN)

· Guest Internet access network

· Demilitarized zone (DMZ)

· Client separation (ISP in a datacentre or large facility)

This document demonstrates the processes required for layer 2 switching using and HP 48 port smart switch which are truncated for failover load balancing.

An overview of the steps as follows;

· Initial Set Up – Naming the switch, creating secure password, adding an IP address and upgrading the firmware.

· Creating VLANs

· Port Set Up – Tagging and untagging ports.

· Uplinking Switches – Connecting the switches to the live network and patching any ports.

Establishing Connection to HP Aruba 2530 Smart Switch

For this task, we’ll be using HP Aruba 2530 smart switch pictured above with 48 ports and a console management port.

1. If you know the IP address of the switch, you can access it using the address in a browser. If however you do not know the IP, you can connect using a serial to USB cable connected to the console port and running an SSH session using PuTTY CLI on port number 22.

You can download PuTTY here: https://www.ssh.com/ssh/putty/download

2. Once your computer is connected to the switch via PuTTY, you will see the interface below, pressing Enter twice with load up the initial configuration screen, displaying the device information.

3. You can check the current configuration by typing the command; Show running-config or sh run

Notice the result of your command as shown above, the Hostname, VLAN details which includes the “DEFAULT_VLAN”, number of untagged ports, IP address type (Usually acquired via DHCP-BOOTP) are displayed on your PuTTY screen.

KeepKey Festive Season Limited Edition

4. To make any changes such as create VLANs, name, password and trunks, you’ll need to access the configuration mode of the switch by typing in the command: Conf t Notice the (config)# line to confirm.

5. Next, you’ll have to enable SSH for access using the following commands; crypto key generate ssh making sure you are in config mode for this to work. Type the next command ip ssh and press Enter.

Upgrading the Firmware on the HP Smart Switch

Part of the set-up process involves checking the firmware is up to date and upgrading if required.

Some pre-requisites are required before an upgrade can be carried out;

· Installation of a TFTP server (SolarWinds).

· Download the firmware from HPE website using a registered account.

· Put the firmware file in the root folder of the TFTP software as seen in software options.

6.Once all the steps are complete, run the command:Copy tftp flash xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx FILENAME.SWI

Once the command is successful, validation and writing system software to flash will begin.

7. Still in Config mode, check the firmware status of the switch with command: sh flash You’ll see the primary image, secondary image, date and version of the firmware installed with the current boot image.

8. The next step involves copying the primary image to the secondary: Copy flash flash secondary and notice the secondary match the primary in date and version.

Naming and Creating Password for the HP Smart Switch

If you work in an environment such a datacentre with multiple switches managing multiple hosts, it’s a good idea to name the switches installed for easy identification and management.

To do this still in config mode, type in the command; Hostname “NAME OF SWITCH” not forgetting to put your chosen name in quotation marks and Enter. You’ll notice the Name of Switch(config) # appear on the next command line window.

We are now ready to create a password for management of the switch using the following command; Password Operator user-name Operator. You will get a prompt on the next line to enter and confirm your chosen password. Bear in mind that the Operator is a read only user.

The ability to read/write changes requires creating a Manager password with the following command; Password Manager user-name Manager. Enter your password and confirm to complete the process.

Creating VLANs on the HP Smart Switch

By default, the switch comes with VLAN1, all ports untagged and no IP address. If you type the sh run command and have already set up your operator and manager passwords, details will be displayed.

9. To edit the VLAN, type vlan 1 and press Enter to drill down into vlan-1. You can name it with command; Name “VLAN Name or Number” and give it an IP address with command; ip address / subnet mask

Execute the sh run command again to see the new configuration interface and check your settings.

10. We can now create other VLANs using the same steps as above. Press Ctrl+Z to go back into config mode or type the command conf t as we did at the beginning. You can call it VLAN2, Name it, assign IP address and subnet mask and check the configuration.

NOTE: A very important command to remember is WR MEM which saves all your configurations. It’s a good idea to get into the habit if running this command anytime you make any changes.

Switch Port Configuration Descriptions

Switches come with varying number of ports from small 8-port, 12-port, 24-port to large 48-port. These ports all come untagged by default and tagging can be configured depending use case scenario.

Untagged: This is a physical member of a VLAN and ports can only be untagged in one VLAN.

Tagged: This a port that will carry traffic to for multiple VLANs to other networking devices. Ports can be tagged into many VLANs.

11.The next section will explore the process of untagging the new VLAN2 we created in the steps above;

Conf t

Vlan 2

Untagged “Port Numbers” eg. Port 14

The example above for a 24-port switch after running our commands and sh run displays the 2 vlans available with port 14 untagged in vlan2 while ports 1-13, 15-24 are untagged in vlan1.

12. Using VLAN2 as our example, we can tag ports using the following command;

Conf t

Vlan2

Tagged “Port number” eg. Port 15

Notice this time, vlan2 has port 15 tagged and port 14 untagged from our previous command.

REMBER: Always run the command WR MEM each time you make any changes as all configurations will be lost if the switch is rebooted.

HP Switch Useful CLI Commands

There are some commands that come in handy as a network administrator when managing switches. Typing Help as usual will bring down a list of possible commands you can execute.

If however you know part of a command, type a few characters and press the Tab key to autocomplete the rest. Explore the following command list below;

#Hostname <hostname>-- Set switch hostname

#Ping <IP Address>-- Ping IP addresses

#Chassislocate -- Turn on/off switch locator LED or blink it (30 minutes)

#ChasisLocate Blink – Blink switch locator LED set time in minutes

#NTP1 <Time Server Name>-- Add time server to NTP server list

#Timesync ntp -- Enable NTP synchronization with servers

#Password operator -- Set operator password (Normal user / Read only)

#Password manager -- Set manager password (Admin user / read-write)

#Password all -- Set password for operator and manager

#Enable -- Switch to manager level from operator level

#Exit -- Exit current level

#Logout -- Logout of the switch

#Wr mem -- Saves configuration to flash

#Conf t – Enter configuration mode

#Untagged <Port Numbers> -- Untags a port from a VLAN

#Tagged <Port Numbers> -- Tags a port to a VLAN

#int <Port Number>disable/enable – Disables or enables a port

Final Thoughts

We hope you found this article useful as a guide to basic VLAN configuration on a HP smart switch. Other advanced configurations are available such as configuring VLAN trunks for connecting two switches in failover scenarios.

Do leave some comments on other ways to perform this task to help other students learn more.

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Secure Your Crypto Offline with KeepKey and ShapeShift

Learn The Blockchain Technology

Written By: www.codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter: @ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at HP Enterprise Solutions

Free Useful Tools from ESET® Antivirus to Protect Users and Families Online

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 20:58:00 +0000

The multiple award winning company ESET headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia was founded in 1992 when Miroslav Trnka and Peter Paško partnered with Rudolf Hrubý. The hugely successful company offers anti-virus and firewall products such as ESET NOD32.

The name ESET was adopted from the Egyptian goddess of health, marriage and love with the company having subsidiaries in Singapore, the United States, Argentina and facilities under development in Czech Republic and Poland.

ESET products span a range of categories including Smart Security Premium, Internet Security, NOD32 Antivirus, Cyber Security Pro for MAC, Anti-Theft and Parental Control for Homes.

Business products are also available in the form of File Security for Windows Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Linux and Solaris. Data access and protection tools such as ESET Secure Authentication and DESlock+ Data Encryption are also available from ESET.

Free Useful Tools from ESET Anti-Virus

The internet as we know it today in 2017 has become an invaluable daily resource that modern life cannot run without. The threats to your privacy every time you log onto a server or access a web application are ever prevalent, with hackers coming up with sophisticated ways to breach your accounts and access your personal information.

Below, we shall discuss some free tools offered by ESET Anti-virus to protect you and your families while they browse the internet as well as protection of your devices from malware and theft.

1. ESET Anti-Theft

This tool increases your chances of getting your missing device back by tracking its location on a map and monitoring foreign activity from the unauthorized user in possession of your device.

Losing your smart phone to theft can be very distressing for the victim, completely cut off from important applications like Outlook for emails, contacts, text messages, banking applications, Google tools, videos, personal pictures, videos, music, Social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Register an account with ESETAnti-Theft Tool to gain the ability to track and locate your stolen device. It works by automatically activating device monitoring when the user marks it as missing.

ESET Anti-Theft uses networks in range to locate the position of your phone on a map to aid retrieval.

A great feature of this tool lets you send a one-way message that appears on the screen of the finder, allowing you to view webcam photos and screen captures of the person in possession of the device.

2. ESET Social Media Scanner

This free tool currently secures over 106 billion social media links 113,000+ user accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Click on the link below to learn more about protecting your Twitter account.

Once on the website, take some time to read about the current threats blocked, links and user accounts protected. Log into your Twitter on another tab, return to the Social Media Scanner page and click Protect Twitter.

You will get a prompt to authorize ESET Social Media Scanner to use your account. Get Protected!

3. ESET Parental Control

This application available on the Android platform is great news for parents. Parental Control helps keep your children safe by guiding their navigation of content online, see what they view and play as well as intervening to block access in a friendly way.

The app also lets you check the location of your children at any time, and acknowledgement messages can be sent to their devices requiring a response before they can continue using their smart phones and tablets.

Application and Web Guard feature filters access to websites based on the age of the child and decide which apps your children can use.

We hope you found some useful information in this article to help protect digital accounts and that of your families from ever evolving threats while surfing the internet.

4. ESET Endpoint Encryption Tool

If you've been keeping tabs on recent events from the world of information security, the clock is fast counting down until the General Data Protection Regulation enforced by the European Union come into force on 28th May, 2018. This new law will see organizations held accountable with heavy monetary fines or even company closures, if client data are lost to hackers from a system breach.

ESET uses DESlock+ encryption technology to provide a simple and powerful solution to organisations of all sizes to become complaint with data protection. The tool uses FIPS 140-2 Validated 256 bit AES encryption with a remote control Hybrid-cloud based management server that supports Windows 10 in UEFI and GPT.

Four versions of the program exists; Personal, Essential, Mobile, Standard and DESlock+ Pro Editions are available with varying functionalities. Full disk and removable disk encryption are only available in standard and pro versions but other useful functionalities like File & folder encryption, text & clipboard encryption, Outlook plugin for email & attachments and centralised management console are available in all versions.

Visit their website below and navigate to Business > Endpoint Security > Data Encryption to download a free trial version of the software for client or server computers. You'll have to register an account with DESlock+ in order to request a trial license or purchase the full software. Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

By:codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter:@ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at ESET Anti-Virus Technologies

Windows Server 2012 R2 Computer Account Management

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 15:32:00 +0000

Computer Account Management

What is a Computer Account?

Located in Active Directory, the Computers container keeps entry records and manages all client machines connected to a server domain environment. Building on from our lesson in Windows Server User Account Management, Launch AD and expand the local domain tree > Select Computers container and notice there are currently no computers listed in the directory as shown below.

Joining Client Workstations to a Domain Server

There are multiple reasons why a network administrator would join a client computer to a domain environment. Central control of resources such as file shares, printers, applications, terminal services and security policies could be easily implemented across the entire network if the client computer is part of a single domain environment.

User account password management, group policy management and varying levels of resource allocations and permissions become easier to manage from a central location with full audit capabilities, provided the client work stations are connected to the domain.

To achieve this in your home lab setting, you will need at least one client operating system like Windows 7 Pro or Windows 10 Pro with a local administrator account. Bear in mind that not all versions of Windows operating system can be part of a domain environment. Windows Home editions for example do not have the capability of joining a domain environment.

Joining Windows 7 Professional to a Domain Server

Fire up and access the Win 7 Pro OS with administrator credentials. Click Start > Right Click Computer and Select Properties.

The version of the operating system, processor and RAM information, architecture type of either 32-bit or 64-bit OS and full computer name are displayed in this window.

Click on Change Settings and a dialog box will open with the option to change the computer name and also join the computer to a domain.

Select Domain and type in the address you created in your server. Eg. Myserver.local. Insert the server admin username and password. Remember to use ServerName\ to ensure you are connecting to the correct server.

Once the domain admin credentials are accepted, you will get a prompt saying Welcome to your domain. Click OK and restart the computer the new change to take effect.

Notice the Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to log on option which becomes available after your computer is connected to a domain. Press the buttons to log on for the first time.

Using any of the User Accounts we previously created during the server set up, log into the client computer and give it a moment to create your new desktop profile for that particular user.

Log back into your server and access the computer container to discover a new computer which we just joined to the domain, is now visible with the name of the workstation for easy identification in Active Directory Users and Computers.

Joining Windows 10 Professional to a Domain Server

The process for joining a Windows 10 Pro computer to a domain is similar to Windows 7 Pro. Log in as admin and access properties of My Computer.

Enter the domain Admin credentials and get a welcome prompt when you have successfully joined the domain. Click to restart the machine and prepare to log in with domain user account for the first time.

In Windows 10, you will have to Click Other User at the bottom left of your log in screen user access.

Finally log back into the domain controller server and notice two computers now appear in the Computer container, confirming the domain joining process has successfully completed.

Computer Lost Trust Relationship with Domain Environment

Sometimes, a user may log a support call with an administrator with an error, the computer has lost trust relationship with the domain environment which prevents a user from logging on.

This is due to the connection between client and server being corrupt and unable to authenticate.

To resolve this, access Active Directory Users and Computers and expand the computer container. Locate the exact computer in question by name and right click then Reset the connection.

You may also want to remove the computer from the domain by switching it to WORKGROUP and rebooting. Make sure a valid local administrator account is available on the workstation as failure to do so may result in total loss of control to that workstation.

After reboot, go through the process of re-joining the untrusted computer back onto the domain and power cycle the machine.

You may now successfully log into the computer using the user domain account credentials.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts

Congratulations for making it this far in the lessons, hopefully your understanding of managing computer accounts on your domain controller server has become clearer after practicing these tutorials.

Join us again as we go further with Windows Server 2012 R2 configuration for our next topic in Group Account Management. Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

By:codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter:@ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Microsoft Corporation

Dell SonicWALL Firewall Appliance Overview

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 15:24:00 +0000

Dell SonicWALL Firewall Appliance

Founded in 1991 by brothers Sreekanth Ravi and Sudhakar Ravi under the name “Sonic Systems, to develop Ethernet and Fast Ethernet cards, hubs and bridges for the Apple market.

Originally headquartered at San Jose, California, the company sells a range of internet appliances primarily directed at content control and network security.

Some of the services provided by these devices include network firewalls, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), UTMs (Unified Threat Management), and anti-spam for emails. Dell acquired SonicWALL on May 9, 2012.

Dell SonicWALL Security Appliance Device Overview

Depending on your networking needs and number of users intended for a network, many different types of SonicWALL devices could be acquired. Models such as the NSA600 series supports 1,000,000 concurrent connections, extensive client- site VPN and 3Gbps full security while smaller models such as the TZ series are suitable for small to medium size businesses supporting 75+ users.

For enterprise grade functionality, SonicWALL offers the E10800series that delivers 40Gbps firewall, 12Gbps Malware Protection and supports 12 Million concurrent connections.

The company also provides wireless solutions with access point models such as SonicWave, SonicPointN2 and Ni series running super-fast 802.11ac wireless protocol.

Dell SonicWALL TZ300 Security Appliance

Many variations of firewalls exists in the TZ series some of which have wireless capabilities denoted by ‘W’ in the model numbers. This article will explore the characteristics of the TZ300 model and the operating system software that runs inside the device to provide content control functionalities.

On the front of the unit, you’ll find the power LED indicator, configuration LED indicator, a powered USB port along with notification indicators for X0 to X4 that flash depending on the ports configured.

The back of the unit consists of a 12 volts manufacturer’s designed power port, Console port for administration, X0 for configuring your Local Area Network, X1 for configuring your Wide Area Network, X2, X3 and X4 which could be used to configure your back up line for the purposes of fail over when your main internet line goes down.

Dell SonicWALL Education and Certification

SonicWALL in association with SecureFirst Partners Portal offers Silver, Gold or Platinum membership and access to SonicWALLUniversity.

Membership advantages include access to a wealth of training materials and knowledge training from authorized specialists which could lead to qualifications as a CertifiedSonicWALL Security Administrator (CSSA) and CertifiedSonicWALL Security Professional (CSSP)

Dell SonicWALL Appliance Operating System Overview

Getting your hands on one of the SonicWALL devices like TZ300 could set you back about £780, a great price for small to medium size businesses to implement network security policies.

For the purposes of learning however, an online live demo emulator version of the device operating system interface is available for Free from SonicWALL

Exploring Dell SonicWALL Appliance Operating System Interface

Running inside a SonicWALL device is the SonicOS operating system, responsible for all the technical configurations carried out by a network administrator.

Below, some of the commonly frequented sections of the firewall device will explored. You may want to spend some time getting familiar with the interface to understand the more advanced features available to securely lock down your network.

1. SonicWALL > System > Status

The SonicOS interface presents you with some 20 functionality tabs with numerous advanced settings options located on the left pane. Click to expand the System tree and Status.

The Status interface contains a wealth of very useful information all collated in one place. You can find the Model Number, Product Code, Serial Number and Authorization Code. The exact firmware version of SonicOS running on your device, Safe Mode version as well as ROM version information can also be found in this window.

A 1.56GHz Octeon Processor and 1GB RAM with 64MB Flash hardware resources are installed on the SonicWALL TZ 600 Firewall. System Up-Time and Registration code can be found in status tab.

To the right of the same page, vital licensing information can be found including Global VPN Client, App Control, Client Content Filtering, McAfee AV Enforcement, Anti-Spyware, Gateway Anti-Virus, Intrusion Prevention, Analyser and Capture ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) amongst others. Contact your device vendor to enquire about licensing depending on the functionality required for the security of your network.

2. SonicWALL > System > Licenses

For small to medium size businesses, the SonicWALL security appliance represents a very affordable solution for implementing firewall security policies across your entire network, as well as intricate device access control procedures such as IP lockdown so the firewall can only be accessed from a controlled environment of your choice.

The Dell SonicWALL device offers advanced functionalities such as Deep Packet Inspection, Unified Threat Management (UTM), L2TP VPN technologies, Wireless 802.11n and 802.11a/b/g networks that can be comprehensively deployed for maximum protection and performance.

The Licensing tab displays detailed information about the Status, Count and Expiration Date of all active and inactive licenses applied to the device. Scroll down to find your Support Service licenses such as Dynamic Support 24/7 (Critically recommended for small to medium sized businesses), Software and Firmware Updates and Hardware Warranty. Contact authorized Vendors for license pricing information. KnowWho License gives administrators the ability to deploy 2FA security across entire networks.

3. SonicWALL > System > Administration

Undeniably the most important section of your firewall device, the administration section gives the engineer complete control of local and remote device access rules, password enforcement, permitted open ports, Enhanced Audit Logging, Certificates, SSH and Advanced GMS management.

4. SonicWALL > System > Settings

The current firmware version running on the device can be found here, along with the ability to import settings from a compatible device and back up configuration settings for disaster recovery scenarios.

5. SonicWALL > Network > Interfaces

You get to configure your WAN on X1 and LAN on X0. The remaining ports may be used to configure multiple WAN connections from multiple ISPs to your site, ensuring network failovers are configured in an event the main internet connection goes down.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found this article useful as a general overview of an affordable firewall device, designed to help network administrators deploy security solutions for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Head over to SonicWALL website for more information about their latest multi-engine cloud-based sandbox against encrypted threats.

Join us again as we explore further advanced configurations and how to leverage complex security deployments against the ever increasing threat of CryptoLocker Ransomware.

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn The Blockchain Technology

By:codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter:@ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Credits to all organisations and development teams at Dell SonicWALL

Secure Password Applications and 2 Factor Authentication (2FA)

noreply@blogger.com (CodeXploitAdmin) — Sat, 04 Nov 2017 21:05:00 +0000

Secure Password Applications and 2 Factor Authentication (2FA)

Remembering passwords which some important applications enforce to be changed at least every three months can be a nuisance, sometimes resulting in people using ‘abcd1234’ for everything online. Creating and recalling effectively strong passwords for every website you visit can be a daunting task.

Password managers are great tools since they don’t only eliminate the task of remembering your access details, but also usually type them in too.

This article will explore 4 secure password applications, many with useful extra features available with the premium versions of the password managers.

1. LastPass

Free, secure login storage and generation – LastPass is renowned as the best password manager available.

Two versions of LastPass exist: Free and Premium available on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android operating systems. Both versions come with unlimited storage for any number of account logins in a secure vault, protected by a master password. Online forms will complete automatically and can even employ multi-factor authentication.

Premium edition offers extra features such as storing passwords for desktop programs, syncing across multiple devices, sharing secured folders with other contacts and generation of complex passwords which are then stored for you.

Download: LastPass Manager

2. Sticky Password

Excellent password management from the expert creators of AVG Antivirus.

You can be rest assured that security is of top priority when the team behind AVG Antivirus developed StickyPassword.

It comes in two versions: free and premium which adds a cloud syncing and backup feature for £19.99, available on Windows, iOS, Mac and Android platforms.

Fingerprint authentication is supported on mobiles including Wi-Fi synchronization with local devices.

Download: Sticky Password

3. RoboForm

Make your life easier with a Top Rated password manager that offers free mobile apps.

Available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android operating systems, RoboForm is a great application for people looking for simple and secure password synchronization between laptops, desktops and mobile devices.

The free version only lets you store up to 10 logins and lacks some of the useful extra features offered by other programs. Should you need to store more passwords, the premium version can be purchased for $19.95 a year.

Download: RoboForm

4. Dashlane

Superb password security that supports all web browsers and devices.

Considered the closest rival to LastPass, Dashlane is exceptionally easy to use with strong password security and the ability to store notes for future reference.

The application supports Windows with browser plugins and mobile versions available. Premium versions come with unlimited syncing and sharing.

Dashlane premium costs $3.33 billed annually but the free version offers essential features such as autofill and digital wallet features, which work flawlessly.

Download: Dashlane Free

Two – Factor Authentication (2FA) Solutions

Based on a variety of technologies, Two-Factor authentication (2FA) most prominently employs one time passwords (OTPs) and Public Key infrastructure to protect your identity and data with a strong authentication process.

One time passwords are simply a form of symmetric token match between two servers, generated at the same time. If the tokens are different, access to a user program or web application is denied. Public key authentication on the other hand, uses an asymmetric pair of private and public encryption keys to grant users access to their web applications.

An overview of 3 well-known applications you can use to secure important web applications will be discussed in the section below. Popular web applications such as PayPal, eBay, Google, Amazon, WordPress among others offer 2FA which can be activated in their advanced security settings menu.

1. Google Authenticator

A mobile application that uses Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) and HMAC- based One-time Password Algorithm (HOTP) for authenticating users.

Google Authenticator really stands out with a feature that doesn’t require internet access or cellular connectivity to authenticate a user, essentially in airplane mode. The application holds multiple accounts in one place using the same mobile number to receive your 2FA code.

It has a simple application interface which works with older versions of Android operating system. Installation file is only 2MB in size, so it works easily on all devices.

Install: GoogleAuthenticator

2. Duo Security

This application enables users to secure their transactions and logins by self-enrolling and authenticating with their smart phones.

Duo Push saves you time from copying numbers with an out-of-band authentication process that prevents remote hackers from stealing your password. The app sends an authorization request directly to the application running on your smartphone, with two push notifications to Approve or Deny authentication.

Duo 2FA can integrate into websites, Cloud Services and VPNs available on iPhones, Androids, Windows, Blackberries and personal computers. Platform Edition of the software offers advanced analytics with Endpoint security that can flag any out-of-date device software posing a possible security risk.

Download: Duo

3. AUTHY

Authy offers 3 different authentication options: Authy OneCode, Authy OneTouch and Authy SoftToken to grant access to any user on iPhones, Android and desktops.

Authy takes the crown for the best 2FA application for desktops with Linux, Mac, Windows, Android and even Apple watch supported.

Security codes generated by the application can be sent directly as a token to the desktop without the need for a smartphone. Your accounts can be synced and backed up to the Cloud, saving you time from manually adding them to each device and browser.

In the event your phone gets stolen, you have the ability to remove the lost phone from the devices’ list directly from the desktop application. This feature stops any unauthorized user of the smartphone from gaining access to any of your accounts.

Download: Authy

Thank you for investing your time with us.

Learn Data Backup on Sia Blockchain

By:codexploitcybersecurity.com Twitter:@ixploitsecurity Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icybersecure

Image credits to all organisations and development teams cited in this article