Edward Snowden gets permanent residency in Russia - Page 12 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15132034
The US whistleblower Edward Snowden and his wife are applying for Russian citizenship in order not to be separated from their future son in an era of pandemics and closed borders, he said on Monday.

Snowden’s wife, Lindsay, is expecting a child in late December, the Interfax news agency cited Anatoly Kucherena, his Russian lawyer, as saying.

Snowden, 37, fled the US and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the US National Security Agency where he was a contractor.

US authorities have for years wanted Snowden returned to the US to face a criminal trial on espionage charges brought in 2013.


“After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That’s why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we’re applying for dual US-Russian citizenship,” Snowden wrote on Twitter.

“Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love, including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the States, so the whole family can be reunited. Our greatest wish is that, wherever our son lives, he feels at home.”

Russia has already granted Snowden permanent residency rights, his lawyer said last month, a vital step towards Russian citizenship.

Snowden is benefiting from an immigration reform signed into law by Vladimir Putin in April that allows foreigners to receive a Russian passport without renouncing other citizenships.

Anatoly Kucherena, a lawyer for Snowden, told Interfax: “Edward has asked me to assist in filing his application for Russian citizenship.”

The reason was to hold the same citizenship as his son, he said.

“Edward has told me that their baby is expected to be born in December; considering that the baby will be entitled to Russian citizenship by the birthright, he also wants to be a citizen of Russia,” Kucherena said, according to Interfax.

The US president, Donald Trump, said in August he was considering a pardon for Snowden. Trump is running for a second presidential term against Democratic challenger Joe Biden in elections on Tuesday.

Snowden keeps a low profile in Russia, speaking only in general terms about his living arrangements. He has denied he is under pressure from the country’s security services or has made any deal to receive asylum. He has praised the country’s natural beauty and the warmth of its people, while using social media to criticise government policy from time to time.

Snowden’s wife announced the pregnancy last week in a photograph posted to Instagram. “A long time in the making,” she wrote. “Our greatest collaboration coming soon.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/02/edward-snowden-applies-for-russian-citizenship-for-sake-of-future-son
#15132063
@ingliz

Yeah, on my SSH server, I have that pretty darn secure. I use Iptables stateless packet filtering firewall and have some of the rules and tables set up to only accept so many packets a second which helps to defeat some forms of DoS attack. I have had hackers from all over the world trying to crack into it to no avail. Some of them were just script kiddie attacks while others looked like really human hackers trying to find ways to crack in but were not able to.

Plus, using public key authentication with challenge passphrase with each of their corresponding private keys to authenticate with for each of the users to my server which defeats password cracking software. In addition, I don't allow root logins and I set root to expire so that attackers can't even attempt to use DoS attacks by attempting to keep a bunch of connections open on attempted root logins. See, it's one thing to disallow root logins another to expire the account.

You want to do both. If you just disallow root logins, an attacker could probably still attempt to authenticate but not completely follow through with it thus keeping the connection open. He could do this from a bunch of spoofed IP addresses to overwhelm your server and crash it. But if you expire the root account, your server won't even allow an authentication attempt connection even though it has already been disallowed. Thus they wouldn't be able to open a bunch of connections attempting to log in as root and crash your server by overwhelming it with too many connections from various spoofed IP addresses. So, I got this one joker who has for many months been running a DoS attack by trying to login as root to my SSH server but I have both disallowed root logins and expired the root account so such attacks do no good and fail at crashing my server. But his attack has been still running automatically for several months to no avail regardless. You can see that in your log files.

I also use a Linux program called Lynis which I use to audit my server and ensure it is hardened as much as possible. Lynis was something I learned to use in one of my cyber-security class and it works wonders. That and following the guidelines from the Center of Internet Security. https://www.cisecurity.org/ . You can use a free, open source Linux Security Incident Event Management System called Linux Security Onion to generate alerts from your log files in the event of a compromise so that you can quickly respond to the incident and contain and eradicate it as well as recover your system.

Authorized users who log in to my SSH server or SFTP into have encrypted connections plus they have to use public/private key authentication with challenge passphrase. So, their accounts and communications are VERY secure given the authentication methods and the fact I use military grade open source encryption to encrypt their SSH and SFTP connections.
#15132072
@ingliz

You done got me started on a subject I LOVE to talk about and have a passion for: computers, IT, programming and cyber-security. According to the Center for Internet Security, the top malware threats were as follows, some of which I have studied in my cyber-security classes:

  1. Emotet
  2. Kovter
  3. ZeuS
  4. NanoCore
  5. Cerber
  6. Gh0st
  7. CoinMiner
  8. Trickbot
  9. WannaCry
  10. Xtrat

https://www.cisecurity.org/cybersecurity-threats/

Probably one of the funniest pieces of malware to read about was the infamous Slammer Worm. It was originally created by a cyber-security expert named David Litchfield. It was a worm that was used to conduct denial of service attacks and infected 75,000 hosts in an extremely short period of time. Something like 10 minutes. This particular nasty piece of malware from back in the day significantly slowed internet traffic big time.

It certainly earned it's name as the "Slammer Worm." It was based on a buffer overflow vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server that David had discovered. I think David demonstrated the vulnerability and Microsoft had released a patch to shore up the vulnerability. However, somebody else took that knowledge and turned it loose on the internet where many still unpatched Microsoft SQL Servers were still operating even though patches had been available 6 months prior. It certainly wrecked havoc at the time. Which goes to show it's really important to keep your systems patched up every day with the latest updated patches for your servers and operating systems.
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