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A while back I wrote a piece about how to Secure the hell out of your Linux box, and I thought I’d follow up with the same but for the Windows world. Yes yes, this is a Linux blog and this kind of post won’t happen all that often, or possibly never again, but security I feel is far more important than technological allegiances.
We can have the most secure box in the world but that doesn’t mean necessarily that we’re safe. There are a lot of interested parties in the world that want your information and the list of who those interested parties are grows by the day. Looking for a job? Well, the companies you’re applying to are running Google searches on your real name, your email address, and any screenname you may have given them, looking you up at LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Making online purchases? Well, both the identity thief and the government would love to track those transactions. Searching for information related to an embarrassing situation in your personal life? Google saves those searches. Like to show off your musical tastes on Last.fm? Congrats, you’re probably broadcasting a good portion of the music you’ve pirated. Logging in to a site to pay a bill? There’s a cracker out there that would love for your password to be transmitted in plain text, rather than encrypted. And lets not forget the fact that AT&T spies on the American populace for the NSA, MPAA, RIAA, and probably any other organization that asked it to. Even if you truly trust a company, you never know what information of yours could be handed over in a lawsuit. Think you’re hidden behind a screen-name? Think again.
I should give a little warning, I do suggest people follow all of these tips, but they are for the paranoid and some will consider it over board.
Related Reading on TuxTraining.com
Did you know that Email is sent in clear text over the Internet? Unless you take steps to secure it, anyone who intercepts a message can easily read it. It’s also really easy for someone to send an email that looks like it came from you. The open source solution for this problem is called GNU Privacy Guard. It uses public key cryptography to encrypt a message, so that only the rightful recipient can read it, or simply sign it so that the recipient can confirm that it came from you. Here’s an installation walk-through for GNU Privacy Guard on Fedora and Ubuntu, along with a brief overview of how to use it with Evolution to send secure email.
With GPG you can encrypt and decrypt files with a password. GPG is an encryption and signing tool for Linux/UNIX like operating system such as OpenBSD/Solaris/Fedora.
