Open source security

Jonni’s playing with his little bag of open source hacking tools this issue. It should come as no surprise that they’re all open source, with the collaborative community development being more a way of life for the hacking community.

From the heights of the DEF CON conferences, through to the open communities surrounding the bigname tools like Kali Linux, and to general online forums, there’s an awful lot of people explaining how hacking works and how to use the tools. It’s in stark contrast to the murky mainstream media portrayal of the hacking world.

The less-exciting truth is that, for many, the best defence is an updated and patched system. As we reported in LXF288, a Google study demonstrated that open source developers are best placed and experienced at delivering timely security fixes. Furthermore, all the big distros – especially the commercially driven ones – offer up-to-the-minute patches.

You might not like it, but it’s one thing Microsoft did get right was forcing security updates. Its big failure, however, was offering its customers an open way to upgrade out of date operating systems, but then its inability to enable users to upgrade is somewhat inevitable due to its proprietary nature. Windows 7 (the 12-year old OS) still accounts for 12 per cent of online Windows users. That’s more people than those running Windows 11.

It’s a blessed relief having access to the latest releases. This is something that open source users don’t have to worry about on the whole, and it’s why every issue we can offer a packed assortments of tutorials like Portainer, Commodore 16 emulation,

FreeCAD, packaging software and commercial-scale CMS systems. It’s amazing and it’s secure, so enjoy!