Hello there fella. I have written this guide in order to help you, who might be my future self, to maintain operational security while searching for security vulnerabilities and whatever not.
- What is operational security
- Why is this important
- How to maintain OpSec
- Behaving correctly
- Avoiding creation and leakage Metadata
There are basically two kinds of hackers, the black hats and the white hats. The black hats are trying to attack others in order to harm them, gain money or out of political interest. The white hats on the other hand try searching for security vulnerabilities or in rare cases even fix them temporarily. However, to the victim, both kinds seem like a threat. In order to avoid legal consequences or even physical harm to you or your family, you should maintain operational security.
TODO
Since your bash history can reveal a great deal of what you've done during your previous session, it's wise to clear it.
Clearing the history works by either deleting or clearing the file ~/.bash_history, which will leave the history in memory. Or clearing the history via the designated command and flushing it afterwards.
# Clears history from memory
history -c
# Flushes current memory-content to ~/.bash_history
history -wThis can either be done manually or on shutdown by using whatever mechanism your distribution offers.
Alternatively, if you want to do this in a rather distribution independent way, you could that line to your ~/.bashrc.