Category: Uncategorized

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Your digital footprints

It is common knowledge we leave digital footprints when using computers and internet, but are you aware how many?

To map an ordinary persons relations and activity based on the digital footprints, requires a huge amount of effort.

To uncover a persons true identity, e.g. a person suspected to be military intelligence requires additional effort as it is expected the country’s military intelligence might have done something to hide the person’s identity.

This is why reading a report like this the one linked below is much more interesting as it describes how bellingcat.com has uncovered one person’s true identity and partly mapped the person’s activity in relation to different assignments the person in question might have been part of.

What I would like to emphasize is our digital footprints and how easy it is to map ordinary people over time.

The report is dated 2018-11-22 and can be read by following the link.

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Firmware updating and system recovery

Updating your system’s firmware can be a challenge. Why, because many manufacturers only supplies Windows based software for updating your systems firmware and this can be quite annoying.

Some times it might be necessary to repair your sytem due to damage boot area and/or files or you have a malware attack you need to clean up.

Below is listed some of the multiple choices you have when it comes to maintenance or emergency repair.

Boot CD

More options

Linux lightweight distibutions

Antivirus

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lshw – Hardware Info

Hardware Lister is console app listing system information, listing hardware components etc.

Ubuntu installation

Ubuntu comes default with the application installed so this command will list your what hardware your system contains.

sudo lshw

This command provides an abundance of info printed to your console.

To get an overview of the possbilities use the --help keyword.

lshw --help
Hardware Lister (lshw) - unknown
usage: lshw [-format] [-options ...]
lshw -version

-version print program version (unknown)

format can be
-html output hardware tree as HTML
-xml output hardware tree as XML
-short output hardware paths
-businfo output bus information
-X use graphical interface

options can be
-class CLASS only show a certain class of hardware
-C CLASS same as '-class CLASS'
-c CLASS same as '-class CLASS'
-disable TEST disable a test (like pci, isapnp, cpuid, etc. )
-enable TEST enable a test (like pci, isapnp, cpuid, etc. )
-quiet don't display status
-sanitize sanitize output (remove sensitive information like serial numbers, etc.)
-numeric output numeric IDs (for PCI, USB, etc.)
-notime exclude volatile attributes (timestamps) from output

Get a better overview

sudo lshw -html > ~/sysinfo.html && firefox ~/sysinfo.html

Explanation:

  • -html tells the app we want the info as html which can be viewed in your web browser.
  • > tells the system to send the data to other destination than default which is your console.
  • ~/sysinfo.html provides the system with the destination, which in this case is a file in your homefolder.
  • && informs the system to execute a command if the first command executed without errors – in this case we want to show the content of the file.
  • firefox ~/sysinfo.html is the instruction opening the Firefox webbrowser using the sysinfo.html just generated in your homefolder.

Manjaro installation

Manjaro does not default having this app installed. This is to be done with this command:

sudo pacman -s lshw