It’s always interesting to look through The Serpent’s logs to see what unusual traffic makes its way to our doors. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the names of exploits may change, but the methods have largely remained the same.

I’m going to gush a little about an application I’ve been using for a few years now. It’s been absolutely instrumental to my career as a network engineer, a cybersecurity consultant, and as a solution architect.

Powerline adapters are great for spreading Ethernet throughout the house without running cables through walls or along floors. Yet there’s a commonly overlooked factor I’ve noticed when people select them. It’s do to with the advertised speeds the adapters are capable of.

It seems with every year that passes, more of our lives head onto our phones. When you think about the level of data they store, it typically matches, if not exceeds that of any other electrical device in our life. Not only does your phone contain pictures, contacts and messages; but also access tokens to other services like financial, utilities and insurance services. Having full access to someone’s phone would be enough to not only investigate their life, but also the lives their friends\family.

Recently I moved over to Virgin Media for Internet access, since I had reached the maximum speeds the old copper cabling from BT could offer me. Virgin, being built on the more modern Nynex network built in the south of England during the early 90’s allowed for much greater speeds. There’s just a couple of irregular checks I have to perform when it comes to switching ISP:

There’s never been a better time to catch up on all those household projects you’ve been putting off over the last X years. With lockdown firmly upon us in the UK, I decided to complete a project that’s been in the back of my mind ever since we subscribed to our third streaming service.

I’ve always been a fan of both Windows and Linux. Each have incredible strengths and weaknesses, and although enough time and effort could be spent consolidating on one platform – It would be very hard for any IT engineer today to not know the other.

This article originally started off as a “Why the hell can’t I enable Mount on Boot!?” query, but after solving that mystery, I decided to dig a little deeper into the operation of Synology NAS encryption. Hopefully this will help you make sense of a somewhat complex issue, especially if you’re not too familiar with encryption in general.

As we roll on towards the year 2020, into a new decade of opportunity, excitement and hopefully reward, it seems like a good time to review your security and privacy practices within your digital life. After all, practicing good security is a process, requiring constant improvement.

Saturday 6th July saw The Debian Project release version 10 of the Debian OS, codenamed “Buster”. I’ve long been a Debian fan, initially seduced by the vision of truly free software (not in the “free pie” sense!), and then over time, it’s simplistic approach to design and the fact it has grandfathered distro’s such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Kali.

Back when I was a network administrator, mobile phones were only just starting to spread throughout the corporate world. Blackberry ruled the industry with their Blackberry Enterprise Suite, and the privileged few employees were issued with phones. For the most part however, mobile devices remained very much personal and with minimal access to corporate resources.

The subject of gaining backdoor access to your private life isn’t a new one. In fact, before modern technology, authorities and organised criminals sought ways to listen in to places they shouldn’t – so what’s up with the latest attempt at gaining a peak into your private communications?

It’s no coincidence I stopped updating The Serpent right around the time my first child was born, that was a wild few years! Fortunately, a long weekend appeared over the horizon and allowed me time to sit down and catch up on some things. One of them being The Serpent.

There’s a lot of talk in the UK about the new “Snoopers Charter” that’s threatening to destroy the very fabric of the Internet (again). As I get older, I find myself worrying less and less about things like this, for two reasons:

Ever tried running your own Certification Authority (CA)? With OpenSSL – it’s not as complicated as you think, though thanks to the lack of decent documentation, there are a few pitfalls. This article walks you through the basics of setting up OpenSSL to run a CA that can sign other end entity certificates.