32
votes
Is Ubuntu affected by the xz backdoor compromise?
As a member of the Community Council and as an Ubuntu Developer myself, I reached out to Debian and Ubuntu security contacts.
LTS and currently stable releases of Ubuntu do not have versions of xz ...
- 74.9k
22
votes
Is Ubuntu affected by the xz backdoor compromise?
Answer: No.
Reasoning:
Ubuntu discourse.
Ubuntu CVE tracker does not have it yet.
Debian and AWS do. AWS has version numbers affected.
Edit: On the 30th of March, it got added to Ubuntu CVE
Recap of ...
- 300k
15
votes
Accepted
How to determine if an application is safe for use on Ubuntu
Let's work upstream to see where this software comes from.
First, let's ask apt for some basic information:
$ apt show onedrive
Package: onedrive
...
Section: universe/net
...
Maintainer: Ubuntu ...
- 62.4k
14
votes
When will CVE message stop showing?
Short answer: When Canonical decides to post another message. And since we're not Canonical, we can't know.
This is "APT News", basically meaning Canonical decided to turn the APT output ...
- 26.3k
12
votes
Does Ubuntu support passkeys, like Apple, Google and Microsoft do?
My Experience as of March 2024.
I tested all the methods below on a passkey demo site https://www.passkeys.io/ . This site allows you to create an account with an email address as the userID and a ...
- 33.4k
12
votes
Server hardening of Ubuntu 22.04 by analyzing and removing unnecessary packages
The dpkg package system has a field for each package indicating its Priority.
You could use this as an initial filter, and only run your script on packages that are categorized as optional and extra (...
- 26.3k
11
votes
Is Ubuntu affected by the xz backdoor compromise?
No.
If you're using some other Linux flavor or a prerelease, or to verify by yourself, issue on the commandline:
xz --version
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
liblzma 5.2.5
(this is a xUbuntu 22.04, updated ...
- 6,714
10
votes
Are login passwords saved on the machine or only a hash version of the password?
Per man shadow, which explains how passwords are stored for users:
encrypted password
This field may be empty, in which case no passwords are required to
authenticate as the specified ...
- 74.9k
9
votes
Accepted
Why is user.max_user_namespaces enabled in Ubuntu by default?
Ubuntu has kept it enabled for a lot longer than Debian, but see Debian's reasoning for enabling it in bullseye which I think is probably the same as Ubuntu's:
From Linux 5.10, all users are allowed ...
- 198k
8
votes
Accepted
Server hardening of Ubuntu 22.04 by analyzing and removing unnecessary packages
In line with the tools you implement in your script, this should be as fast as it gets:
dpkg --get-selections |
cut -f1 |
xargs apt-cache rdepends --installed |
awk '! /Reverse Depends:/ {
tp = $0
...
- 32.4k
7
votes
Accepted
Clamscan viruses scanning, too many viruses
How good is it, if anyone tried it before?
It's at most as good as any other antivirus. Which means it doesn't protect against zero-day or targeted attacks, and can only clean up known threats a few ...
- 4,650
6
votes
Accepted
Does Ubuntu support passkeys, like Apple, Google and Microsoft do?
You can use passkeys on Ubuntu with these browsers:
Google Chrome
Microsoft Edge (there's a version available for Linux)
Mozilla Firefox, with this clarification:
Web Platform support of Passkeys ...
- 41.8k
6
votes
best practice updating apps installed from .deb?
Best practice is to avoid manually downloading and installing .deb files.
Distros (like Debian and Ubuntu) are the standard mechanism to push updates to users. When you manually download and install a ...
- 62.4k
5
votes
Unrecognized accessed paths - is my server being attacked?
NOTE: This is said with my IT Security Professional hat on, which comes with over 10 years of analyzing network traffic and attack/scanner patterns.
What you are seeing is typical service scanner ...
- 74.9k
4
votes
Upgrade OpenSSH from v8.9 to v9.3 on 22.04.2 LTS?
Your security team are likely relying specifically on scanner results, which are typically incorrect.
Ubuntu patches CVEs with patches cherrypicked and applied to the version in the Ubuntu repos and ...
- 74.9k
4
votes
How can I tell if a CVE has been fixed in Ubuntu's repositories?
The quickest way to figure out which packages (if any) contain the fix is to append the CVE identifier to URL prefix https://ubuntu.com/security/. I'll use CVE-2023-2650 as an example and in that case,...
- 3,360
4
votes
Is Lubuntu as safe as Ubuntu?
Based on your core question of "safe from malware that could exploit the OS and infect the PC", Lubuntu is no more and no less secure than Ubuntu which runs GNOME. You are equally at risk ...
- 74.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Suspicous windows-like notifications from brave web browser (allegedly)
Most likely those are crypto ads from Brave browser itself. As per Brave forums and other sites, you can disable these ads.
Disable Brave private ads:
Open Brave browser and go to: brave://settings/...
- 2,176
4
votes
Server hardening of Ubuntu 22.04 by analyzing and removing unnecessary packages
This is my final implementation with input from @Raffa, @artur-meinild, and @Dan.
I tested the script on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) and a VM on my iMac (8GB, i5, SSD, 2015) and runtime was about 1 second ...
- 131
4
votes
Accepted
When performing security updates that apply to all Ubuntu versions, do the latest releases get priority over older, still supported ones?
No supported release has a higher priority over another supported release.
CVE mitigations for different releases may appear at different times for many possible reasons.
A common generic reason is ...
- 62.4k
4
votes
Accepted
Does Ubuntu 22.04.3 come with the Downfall patch pre-installed?
How to determine the package version before install.
Go the the download page. Example for 22.04.3: https://releases.ubuntu.com/jammy/
Look for the .manifest file for your preferred .iso
The ....
- 62.4k
4
votes
Accepted
Thunderbird updated to major new version, even on LTS
"I thought that this was supposed to just have security fixes, not general updates."
There have always been a very few exceptions, including web browsers, and that opens our operatic tale of ...
- 62.4k
4
votes
Accepted
Find CVE fixed in linux-image-generic
Please note that linux-image-generic is a meta-package that will always depend on the latest generic kernel image available for your Ubuntu release/version ... You can find out which one it is ...
- 32.4k
4
votes
Is Ubuntu affected by the xz backdoor compromise?
If you have reason to suspect that you might have a system with a compromised release installed, take it offline immediately. As noted in other answers, many executables link directly or indirectly (e....
- 198k
4
votes
Why does fail2ban report my auth.log file as removed?
The explanation is given here. Fail2ban is not removing the file, it is removing the monitoring of the file. This logging message is confusing and deserve an upgrade.
- 822
3
votes
How can we filter out personal information from "journalctl"?
Many of the items you mention aren't worth concealing, or aren't logged.
Does your firewall or router do NAT (Network Address Translation)? Everybody's got 192.168.*.* IPs, so there is no benefit to ...
- 36.5k
3
votes
Is Lubuntu as safe as Ubuntu?
Don't forget Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor, and is thus built on the same infrastructure by the same tools; just with a different seed files.
Lubuntu 23.04 seed - https://ubuntu-archive-team....
- 30.4k
3
votes
Is Lubuntu as safe as Ubuntu?
Your security theorem based on read only vs. read/write media appears to be a bit outdated ... There was a time long ago when read only media e.g. CDs/DVDs were shipped directly from the creator/...
- 32.4k
3
votes
Putting Digital Signature on PDF in Ubuntu 20.04
The answer depends on how exactly you plan to digitally sign your document.
The whole thing will get digitally signed by some encryption algorithm.
Signing things in a void is generally not very ...
- 1,301
3
votes
Accepted
Security update missing (apt update)
The link you posted refers to CVE-2023-20900, which Ubuntu has already backported into open-vm-tools version 2:11.3.0-2ubuntu0~ubuntu20.04.6 in Ubuntu 20.04.
For more details, see CVE-2023-20900
- 28.5k
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