I’d had this code sitting around for a while and decided to make a new site dedicated to it. It’s called passwds.io. It’s a simple service that produces pseudo-random passwords that have some elements that can actually be pronounced, hopefully making them easier to remember.
I do not recall where I got the original code to generate the pronounceable passwords, but am trying to find the source so I can credit where it’s deserved.
Brandon Lighter brought up the fact that I could be storing all generated passwords, but I’m not. This was developed as a tool for myself to use while I was a sys admin at a large local business, I’d use it to create new passwords for users in Active Directory. It’s still the same code.
Once I can bring the code to a level that isn’t so scattered, I will put it on GitHub so everyone can see the source and what’s going on. It’s really very, very simple.
Of course, I could omit the important “logging” piece when pushing to GitHub, but at some point people just have to trust others, and I’m flat out saying there’s no type of logging being done at passwds.io, other than the standard Google Analytics and Gaug.es for site analytics/
Brandon does bring up good points though, like no usage of special characters.
Secondly, they are only lower-case, upper-case, and numbers, which means you are pulling from a much smaller character set than you could be, making brute-force attacks easier.
I may add an option to do pronounceable passwords, or passwords with special characters enabled, which would probably break pronounceability. But options are always nice.
If you have other suggestions, I’d love to hear them. I’ve debated adding user accounts and the ability to save your generated passwords (that would be accessible only by you), but that sort of goes beyond the scope of passwds.io, which is simple, fast password password creation.
An example output from passwds.io can be seen in the screenshot below.
Also, check out Placezombie.com if you’re looking for some pretty gruesome zombie images to use as placeholder images in your designs. Sample 900×150 pixel greyscale image below, achieved with https://placezombie.com/g/900×150 :
Anyway, like I said, I’d love to hear your thoughts on passwds.io. Leave a comment here, it’s the best way to communicate with me about passwds.io. I haven’t bothered setting up passwds.io email yet.
I have yet to use ServerPilot, but will be setting up a new VPS at DigitalOcean in the coming weeks for a new venture. ServerPilot makes getting a LAMP stack setup very quickly.
ServerPilot will automatically install Nginx, Apache, PHP, and MySQL on a new, freshly installed/created, 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 or Ubuntu 14.04. So if you’re using DigitalOcean, create your Droplet, and SSH to it. You should be able to harden SSH up a little, but make sure you don’t install any new packages yet.
Getting Started
Getting started with ServerPilot is crazy easy. All you need to be able to do is SSH into your server and run a command. I highly doubt anyone reading this doesn’t know how to do this. If you don’t, Google will tell you how.
“Connect” a new server. Just enter your servers hostname and click the “Continue With Setup” button. Screenshot below.
3. Run The Install
Connect to your server via SSH. Remember, it must be a new server, preferably with no additional packages installed yet. To install Nginx, Apache, PHP, and MySQL, run the command below, from this gist:
The --server-id and --server-apikey values will be provided for you, they’re blacked out in the screenshot below.
This repository provides a sample Vagrant configuration for testing ServerPilot. Basically a server that you can use to test ServerPilot before using it on a new, paid VPS. The README is very detailed, definitely read it if you need help using Vagrant. There’s even an example on using composer to create a Laravel app.
ServerPilot/API
From the README, The ServerPilot API is RESTful and allows you to manage ServerPilot resources using HTTP requests. All responses return JSON objects, including errors. As seems typical from ServerPilot, the documentation in the README is excellent.
The API will let you do things like list servers, connect new servers, or list all system users, among many others. An example that would list all servers can be seen in the gist below.
That request would return JSON similar to this:
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Paid Accounts
You get a pretty cool monitoring dashboard for $10/month. I found the screenshot below in a post from Jake Peterson, it appears to be the ServerPilot monitoring dashboard.
There’s the free plan, obviously, and then two paid plans. One is $10/month and the other is $49/month. You can see what you get for your money on their pricing page.
End
If you’re a PHP developer and use a VPS provider like DigitalOcean or Linode, ServerPilot is probably worth checking out. Even if you don’t end up using, it’s pretty neat that something like this even exists.
I only have one feature I’d really like to see, the ability to select certain packages to be installed. If that were included in the $10/month plan, I’d definitely do it. As it stands currently, though, it’s definitely a time saver and very well executed.
Down in the comments, you’ll see that the owners forgot to renew the domain name, so it obviously stopped working. The source was posted on GitHub, so I immediately forked it and got to work setting up a replacement.
A quick check revealed that placezombie.com was available, so I registered it. Score.
I really didn’t want to host this at DigitalOcean like I typically would, not knowing what to expect for bandwidth usage. Instead, I chose to host it at Heroku, using their free service.
My 5 year old daughter is obsessed with Zombies and is going to fucking love this. She wants to be a Zombie Elsa (from the movie Frozen) for Halloween. :)
I’ve writtenaboutPapertrail a few times before, I love the service and it’s just too valuable to not use.
Papertrail makes it super easy to find Shellshock exploit attempts and probes. Probes are just checking a machine to see if it’s vulnerable to Shellshock. If you’re using CloudFlare, you’ll never see any Shellshock attempts show up in your logs, CloudFlare doesn’t even let them through.
See If Shellshock Affects You
Checking to see if your system is vulnerable to Shellshock is quite easy. It takes a relatively simple bash command:
env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable to shellshock' bash -c "echo All good"
Run that code in a terminal. If you see All good, you’re not vulnerable. However, if you see vulnerable to shellshock, you are potentially vulnerable.
Shellshocker.net provides a script that will download, compile, and install the newest version of bash for you. You should only use it though if your Linux distribution hasn’t already provided updated security release packages. If you’re interested, the code that runs Shellshocker.net is available on GitHub.
Find Shellshock Attemps and Probes Via The Command Line
This is very easy as long as you know the location of your Apache access log file. It’s typically something like /var/log/apache2/access.log. Assuming that’s the location of your Apache access log file, this command will pull out all the Shellshock probes and attempts:
grep '() {' /var/log/apache2/access.log
If nothing was returned, that means nobody has been trying to exploit Shellshock on your system, or even checking to see if your system is susceptible to Shellshock. If results are returned, look them over carefully to examine where the attempts are coming from, an IP address will be associated with every attempt.
Shellshocker.net Checker
Shellshocker.net also provides a bash script to check your machines for the Shellshock vulnerability. You can download the script and run it manually from your terminal, or, if you have cURL installed, run the following command:
Running that command will produce results similar to the screenshot seen below. It checks for a number of Shellshock related vulnerabilities.
Find Shellshock Attemps and Probes With Papertrail
Go to your Papertrail events tab and search for the following: "() {"
If anything is returned, those are Shellshock probes. Some example probes are listed in the gist that’s embedded below. None of the offending IP addresses have been redacted.
These actually made it through to Papertrail, which shouldn’t happen since longren.io sits behind Cloudflare. I’ll open a support ticket with them about it and update this post later.
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