Free Wireguard VPN service on AWS

The reasoning

The increase of Internet censorship by authoritarian regimes expands the blockage of useful internet resources making impossible the use of the WEB and in essence violates the fundamental right to freedom of opinion and expression enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The following is the detailed 6 steps instruction for non-IT people to deploy free* VPN service upon Wireguard technology in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, using a 12 months free account, on an Instance (virtual machine) run by Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS.

I tried to make this walkthrough as friendly as possible to people far from IT. The only thing required is assiduity in repeating the steps described below.

Splunk is the most known commercial product to gather and analyze logs. Even now, when Splunk has stopped sales in the Russian Federation. And that's not a reason not to write the how-to articles about this product.

• First of all, you can read this article in russian here.

One evening, I was reading Mastering regular expressions by Jeffrey Friedl , I realized that even if you have all the documentation and a lot of experience, there could be a lot of tricks developed by different people and imprisoned for themselves. All people are different. And techniques that are obvious for certain people may not be obvious to others and look like some kind of weird magic to third person. By the way, I already described several such moments here (in russian) .

For the administrator or the user the command line is not only a tool that can do everything, but also a highly customized tool that could be develops forever. Recently there was a translated article about some useful tricks in CLI. But I feel that the translator do not have enough experience with CLI and didn't follow the tricks described, so many important things could be missed or misunderstood.

Under the cut — a dozen tricks in Linux shell from my personal experience.

Some time ago among security researchers, it was very “fashionable” to find improperly configured AWS cloud storages with various kinds of confidential information. At that time, I even published a small note about how Amazon S3 open cloud storage is discovered.

However, time passes and the focus in research has shifted to the search for unsecured and exposed public domain databases. More than half of the known cases of large data leaks over the past year are leaks from open databases.

Today we will try to figure out how such databases are discovered by security researchers...

I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.

If you are working with Kubernetes environment then you probably make use of several existing templating tools, some of them being a part of package managers such as Helm or Ksonnet, or just templating languages (Jinja2, Go template etc.). All of them have their own drawbacks as well as advantages and we are going to go through them and write our own tool that will try to combine the best features.

Monitoring is the most important part of your infrastructure. Monitoring is system engineers basics. However, everyone has his own way to understand it. My way consist of denial. anger & acceptance.

Author of the original post in Russian: frsamara

I always loved playing with things and testing them under all sorts of wacky conditions as a kid and even considered getting a job as a tester, but I never did. Nevertheless, I still like taking things made by someone else and poking them for vulnerabilities.

I remember, when first self-service payment terminals started popping around town, I saw one of them put up a browser window while updating, and the game was on — I broke it almost immediately. There’s been a lot of discussion about it since then and developers have started to pay a lot more attention towards security in these machines.

Recently, fast-food joints have started installing these terminals. Obviously, it’s quite convenient: just tap a couple of virtual buttons, place an order, pay with a bank card and wait for your number to show on the screen.

Also, nearly every big mall has these interactive boards with floor plans and information on various sales and discounts.

How secure are they?