system management

The OpSec Series - System Management

This post is part of a larger series. You can find all posts over here. Setting up systems can be a lengthy and boring process. It is easy to forget a step, execute it in the wrong order or use the wrong settings. I still remember the day when I had to reinstall the Operating System of my laptop on a yearly basis. Microsoft Windows has a tendency to become slower over time....

January 22, 2024 · 20 min · 4107 words · Valentijn Harmers
authentication

The OpSec Series - Authentication

This post is part of a larger series. You can find all posts over here. We have arrived at one of the most hated parts of security: Authentication. Everyone knows the frustration of having to type in a username and password before accessing the systems you need to do your work. You even need specialized applications in order to keep track of all of these credentials. I sometimes feel like a stamp collector but instead of collecting stamps, I am collecting passwords....

March 14, 2023 · 19 min · 4025 words · Valentijn Harmers
chat

The OpSec blog series - Chat platforms

This post is part of a larger series. You can find all posts over here. Hello and welcome to a new blog post in the OpSec blog series. As already mentioned in the previous post, this one will be about chat platforms. I can still remember a time when I was in school and carried around a Sony Ericsson J110 dumb phone. I didn’t use it much. It was just for contacting my parents in case of emergencies....

October 1, 2022 · 37 min · 7768 words · Valentijn Harmers
e-mail

The OpSec blog series - E-mail encryption

This post is part of a larger series. You can find all posts over here. Welcome to the second blog post in this blogging series. I recommend reading the introduction post before starting with this one. Email is one of the oldest ways to communicate on the world wide web. And since the internet was created with openness in mind, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that e-mail wasn’t designed to be very secure....

September 13, 2022 · 30 min · 6278 words · Valentijn Harmers

The OpSec blog series - Introduction

Have you ever had the desire to improve the security of your systems but had no idea how to do it? You might have read all kinds of articles on the web about hacked companies that needed to pay large sums of money to get access to their data again. But what can you do, when you are just a system administrator of a small company with a non-existent security budget?...

September 7, 2022 · 11 min · 2221 words · Valentijn Harmers