Erwin Bierens

Knowledge is Power

How to block Facebook from your PC

2016-05-28 2 min read Privacy Erwin Bierens

Facebook wants to sell every Ad and you on the Web. The social network will show ads to non-Facebook users on other websites.

Companies like Facebook and Google offer you their services for free, but free always has a cost. Advertising pays the bills and the contributors, and these big companies separate themselves from serving up ads that are better targeted than other smaller networks. By tracking you across the web and building a profile (Big Data) that helps which ads you’re going to click most likely.

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Block the Blue Coat Intermediate CA from Windows

2016-05-27 1 min read Security Erwin Bierens

Symantec has gotten in hot water for issuing rogue certificates (source). While Symantec has agreed to certificate transparency, Blue Coat systems is a known operator of MITM services they sell to enterprises, nation-states and governments, and this certificate would allow Blue Coat to issue arbitrary MITM certificates.

OSX instruction can be find over here (By Filippo Valsorda)

Block the Intermediate CA on your windows computer

  1. Download the certificate to your computer or just click “Open”. (for Firefox users read below)

Blue Coat Intermediate CA

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Privacy and Anonymity

2016-05-23 3 min read Privacy Erwin Bierens

Privacy

Privacy is an increasingly rare commodity these days. To find out what kind of information is there about you do a search for yourself on Pipl.com, you might be surprised at the number of companies that claim to have information about you and your relatives.

That’s because your personal information, including your email address, phone number and daily activities on Social Networks and apps, are worth a lot of money to legitimate businesses, your new employer, government and bad guys (read hackers).

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Yealink Skype for Business Firmware

2016-05-23 1 min read Skype for Business Erwin Bierens

Yealink is continuing its legacy of innovation with the delivery of an end-to-end unified communications (UC) solution for Microsoft environments. The UC Edition of its IP phones is customizable and seamlessly integrates with user workflows. UC Edition phones, crafted with new features tailored for Skype for Business/Lync, extend the communication experience and facilitate better collaboration.

Yealink has certified the following models for a direct connection with Skype For Business:

  • T40P
  • T41P
  • T42G
  • T46G
  • T48G

Download Yealink Firmware

Since the site isn’t very handy with finding tools and firmware, i will list the latest firmware version below. You can download then from my stack account:

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Force HTTPS On Your WordPress Site

2016-05-12 2 min read Security Erwin Bierens

I’m running my wordpress site for quite some time now.. My site is HTTPS enabled and signed with a certificate. HTTP was also possible in the past for reaching my site. In this guide i’m going to point all of the pages (including the administrative) to force HTTPS.

To simplify this, the guide will build into the following 3 parts:

  1. Force SSL for administrator pages (including the login page)
  2. Secure all normal pages with HTTPS
  3. Change .htaccess to redirect all HTTP to HTTPS

When all of this is completed you should have a WordPress site completely running secure with HTTPS.

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OpenVPN in Kali Linux

2016-04-30 2 min read Security Erwin Bierens

This how to describes how to configure Kali to use a openVPN for securing your traffic.

Why should u use VPN?

Here’s my top 5 why you want to use a VPN service.

  1. VPN provides Privacy and hides your own External IP address.
  2. Use any network (public or private or free (hotspot WiFi) with encryption.
  3. Login to your home or Work network from anywhere with confidence of encrypted traffic.
  4. Bypass censorship and content monitoring  by goverments.
  5. Browse and bypass Firewall and censorship policy from Anywhere!

As you can see from the list above, VPN not necessarily hides everything. Search engines  like google, bing and yahoo can still recognizes you based on your cookies or account sign-in. So make sure you use tools like Bleachbit (clear browsing data etc) and enable plugins in your browser for tracking and ads (privacy badger, uBlock Origin or Privacy.net analyzer).

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How to install BeEF on Ubuntu

2016-04-26 2 min read Security Erwin Bierens

Beef BeEF stands for The Browser Exploitation Framework. It is a great penetration testing tool that focuses on the web browser.

Amid growing concerns about web-borne attacks against clients, including mobile clients, BeEF allows the professional penetration tester to assess the actual security posture of a target environment by using client-side attack vectors. Unlike other security frameworks, It looks past the hardened network perimeter and client system, and examines exploitability within the context of the one open door: the web browser. It will hook one or more web browsers and use them as beachheads for launching directed command modules and further attacks against the system from within the browser context.

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