Guides

failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/wordpress

I was doing some WordPress foo on the site (I know right, shockingly I don’t want to hand craft a website and I’d rather be helping customers or really anything else really) and I came into this error when I was installing the wpforms plugins:

 file_put_contents(/var/www/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wpforms/cache/addons.json): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpforms-lite/src/Helpers/CacheBase.php on line 215
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Education

Is my house spying on me?

Do you ever get the feeing you are being watched? What about listening to it? Do you ever talk about a subject and then see it appear in adverts despite never using a computer to search for it?

Well don’t worry there’s lots of reasons as to why this can occur, and whilst you might want to think someone is spying on you, the truth is they probably aren’t looking for you, but they might be harvesting your data.

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IOT

IoT Security

The digital explosion, the consumerization of technology and the world of internet connected fridges leads to a range of security and privacy risks.

There’s lots of work that’s occurred in this space, for example there is the : Code of Practice for Consumer IoT Security

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Threat Intel

Active Cybercrime Groups

Ransomware this, ransomware that! The problem is, you can be tired of the subject but that doesn’t mean the threat has gone away! So what are the currently active ransomware groups posting victims?

Well here’s a list of currently active group (Both Ransomware and Marketplaces) names who have ONLINE “DARK WEB” (TOR) hidden services online and who are posting victims or are markets:

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Snake Oil Threat Intel

DNSSEC – why not having a signed zone is…

Firstly, what is DNSSEC?

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/dnssec-what-is-it-why-important-2019-03-05-en

Ok read all that good. What we are talking about here is signing a DNS zone to “assure” that the client is getting DNS responses from the right ZONE data. DNSSEC does not encrypt the conversation between DNS client and DNS server. It does enable the client to be able to check if the data it gets back is valid. In short what we are doing is validating that the “data” being returned is authorized and not tampered with.

Read more “DNSSEC – why not having a signed zone is almost never going to lead to you getting pwn3d” →
Leadership

Why is security so hard?

  • It requires being thorough.
  • It required documenting things.
  • It requires conducting training and drills.
  • It adds what can be viewed as additional effort/cost to the primary goals (sell widgets/services/time)
  • It involves weird and wonderful ways of abusing functionality that is not always apparent or expected, thus to the typical consumers/user of a service, the idea that it might be abused actually seems very unlikely (to a criminal or security pro, the idea it will be abused seems far more likely based on threat intelligence etc.)
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