It's been aninteresting year for security and users. It all kicked off at the beginning of the year with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica causing people suddenly to think more seriously about their data and what they share on social media. In fact, the threatagainst personal datahas been an important theme for the year. We've seen breaches at companies such as Marriott (in December) and British Airways (September) and Under Armour (March). What's interesting about these is that the criminals seem to be targeting all levels of the stack, from the enterprise backend to the web app to the mobile app on people's phones.
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The defensive coding guide Why microservices are a security issue 10 layers of linux container security More security articlesAnother story that won't go away is hardware. Bloomberg Businessweek published a much-disputed story suggesting that a Chinese military agency convinced or forced Supermicro to insert tiny chips on motherboards for companies such as Apple and Amazon. Whether the story is true or not, it has opened people's minds to the realisation that we have less control over the supply chain than we thought we did. Alongside that was another realisation: chip-related security issues such as Meltdown and Spectre, which were revealed at the very beginning of January, are likely to be joined by a never-ending set of similar or related vulnerabilities that the average user has little capability to mitigate.
With all that said, we've had numerous articles onOpensource.com to help you secure your passwords, containers, and more.
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About the author
Mike Bursell
I've been in and around Open Source since around 1997, and have been running (GNU) Linux as my main desktop at home and work since then:not always easy... I'm a security bod and architect, and am currently employed as Chief Security Architect for Red Hat. I have a blog - " Alice, Eve & Bob " - where I write (sometimes rather parenthetically) about security. I live in the UK and...
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