Many tech enthusiasts find the ability to control their host name resolution important. Setting up servers and services usually requires some form of fixed address, and sometimes also requires special forms of resolution such as defining Kerberos or LDAP servers, mail servers, etc. All of this can be achieved with dnsmasq.

dnsmasq is a lightweight and simple program which enables issuing DHCP addresses on your network and registering the hostname & IP address in DNS. This configuration also allows external resolution, so your whole network will be able to speak to itself and find external sites too.

This article covers installing and configuring dnsmasq on either a virtual machine or small physical machine like a Raspberry Pi so it can provide these services in your home network or lab. If you have an existing setup and just need to adjust the settings for your local workstation, read the previous article which covers configuring the dnsmasq plugin in NetworkManager.

Install dnsmasq

First, install the dnsmasq package:

sudo dnf install dnsmasq

Next, enable and start the dnsmasq service:

sudo systemctl enable --now dnsmasq

Configure dnsmasq

First, make a backup copy of the dnsmasq.conf file:

sudo cp /etc/dnsmasq.conf /etc/dnsmasq.conf.orig

Next, edit the file and make changes to the following to reflect your network. In this example, mydomain.org is the domain name, 192.168.1.10 is the IP address of the dnsmasq server and 192.168.1.1 is the default gateway.

sudo vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf

Insert the following contents:

domain-needed

bogus-priv

no-resolv

server=8.8.8.8

server=8.8.4.4

local=/mydomain.org/

listen-address=::1,127.0.0.1,192.168.1.10

expand-hosts

domain=mydomain.org

dhcp-range=192.168.1.100,192.168.1.200,24h

dhcp-option=option:router,192.168.1.1

dhcp-authoritative

dhcp-leasefile=/var/lib/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.leases

Test the config to check for typos and syntax errors:

$ sudo dnsmasq --test

dnsmasq: syntax check OK.

Now edit the hosts file, which can contain both statically- and dynamically-allocated hosts. Static addresses should lie outside the DHCP range you specified earlier. Hosts using DHCP but which need a fixed address should be entered here with an address within the DHCP range.

sudo vi /etc/hosts

The first two lines should be there already. Add the remaining lines to configure the router, the dnsmasq server, and two additional servers.

127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain

::1         localhost localhost.localdomain

192.168.1.1    router

192.168.1.10   dnsmasq

192.168.1.20   server1

192.168.1.30   server2

Restart the dnsmasq service:

sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq

Next add the services to the firewall to allow the clients to connect:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-service={dns,dhcp}
sudo firewall-cmd --runtime-to-permanent

Test name resolution

First, install bind-utils to get the nslookup and dig packages. These allow you to perform both forward and reverse lookups. You could use ping if you’d rather not install extra packages. but these tools are worth installing for the additional troubleshooting functionality they can provide.

sudo dnf install bind-utils

Now test the resolution. First, test the forward (hostname to IP address) resolution:

$ nslookup server1

Server:       127.0.0.1

Address:    127.0.0.1#53

Name:    server1.mydomain.org

Address: 192.168.1.20

Next, test the reverse (IP address to hostname) resolution:

$ nslookup 192.168.1.20

20.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa    name = server1.mydomain.org.

Finally, test resolving hostnames outside of your network:

$ nslookup fedoramagazine.org

Server:       127.0.0.1

Address:    127.0.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name:    fedoramagazine.org

Address: 35.196.109.67

Test DHCP leases

To test DHCP leases, you need to boot a machine which uses DHCP to obtain an IP address. Any Fedora variant will do that by default. Once you have booted the client machine, check that it has an address and that it corresponds to the lease file for dnsmasq.

From the machine running dnsmasq:

$ sudo cat /var/lib/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.leases

1598023942 52:54:00:8e:d5:db 192.168.1.100 server3 01:52:54:00:8e:d5:db

1598019169 52:54:00:9c:5a:bb 192.168.1.101 server4 01:52:54:00:9c:5a:bb

Extending functionality

You can assign hosts a fixed IP address via DHCP by adding it to your hosts file with the address you want (within your DHCP range). Do this by adding into the dnsmasq.conf file the following line, which assigns the IP listed to any host that has that name:

dhcp-host=myhost

Alternatively, you can specify a MAC address which should always be given a fixed IP address:

dhcp-host=11:22:33:44:55:66,192.168.1.123

You can specify a PXE boot server if you need to automate machine builds

tftp-root=/tftpboot
dhcp-boot=/tftpboot/pxelinux.0,boothost,192.168.1.240

This should point to the actual URL of your TFTP server.

If you need to specify SRV or TXT records, for example for LDAP, Kerberos or similar, you can add these:

srv-host=_ldap._tcp.mydomain.org,ldap-server.mydomain.org,389
srv-host=_kerberos._udp.mydomain.org,krb-server.mydomain.org,88
srv-host=_kerberos._tcp.mydomain.org,krb-server.mydomain.org,88
srv-host=_kerberos-master._udp.mydomain.org,krb-server.mydomain.org,88
srv-host=_kerberos-adm._tcp.mydomain.org,krb-server.mydomain.org,749
srv-host=_kpasswd._udp.mydomain.org,krb-server.mydomain.org,464
txt-record=_kerberos.mydomain.org,KRB-SERVER.MYDOMAIN.ORG

There are many other options in dnsmasq. The comments in the original config file describe most of them. For full details, read the man page, either locally or online.

Presented by Dolby

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S would be the first consoles to support both Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision.  This is exciting news, for the first-time, developers can deliver the full range of depth of content as it was created in the studio. Higher dynamic range, and deeper immersion brings full authenticity to the games we’ll see in these next-generation consoles.

A quick review for those of you not familiar with Dolby Atmos, it’s a spatial audio technology that places the sounds of the game all around you with three-dimensional precision, overhead, behind and below.

Dolby Atmos game mixes are created using the middleware you use today, requiring at most a new plugin to expand your master channel count to 12. With the addition of overhead monitors, you’re now free from the constraints of a horizontal mix. Plus, Dolby Atmos allows you the ability to mix once and have it fold down gracefully for any playback environment including TV, sound bars or headphones.

Also, by providing precision in a 360-degree sphere around the player, audio teams find more room to add spectacle, drama, and subtlety. No longer do your audio elements have to compete for space.  And, representing height is no longer deep science. Simply pan objects to the overhead channels, and there you have it. Planes fly overhead, overpasses “whoosh” as you race under, reflections and ambience take on a whole new level of realism now that you don’t have to simulate height.

As a sound designer, Dolby Atmos allows you to create a fuller and more realistic environment for your players, making them feel like they’re in the middle of the environment you so painstakingly created.

Audio teams have remarked that they are able to deliver a better experience using Atmos, and Microsoft’s support of Dolby Vision on next generation consoles promises to do the same for art and graphics teams. Dolby Vision brings your game’s landscape to life with vivid realism — with brightness, contrast, color, and detail that goes beyond even traditional HDR games.  It’s a better picture for the player and less work for your team.

Dolby Vision combines two powerful technologies, high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut, providing 40x brighter highlights, 10x deeper black levels and up to 12-bit color depth.

Integrating the Dolby Vision SDK into your game not only unlocks the next-generation imaging on your Dolby Vision displays, it also allows you to deliver a consistent and optimized look across all Dolby Vision, HDR10 and SDR displays with a single authoring pipeline.

For more information on how to get started with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision for your Xbox and PC games please visit developer.dolby.com or contact us at [email protected].

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Champaign, Illinois

Volition is seeking an energetic, driven, and skilled engine programmer to participate in the development of technology for our next generation of titles. You will be working in a collaborative environment of artists, designers, and programmers and will have the opportunity to develop and enhance systems for large scale open world games. We are considering applicants for a senior or principal programming position.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and enhance core systems for AAA Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC titles
• Develop and enhance core pipelines for all of our titles

Requirements:

• Extensive C/C++ programming skills with an in depth understanding of software construction
• Strong understanding of software engineering principles as applied to architecting systems for use in large scale code bases and teams
• Significant game development experience in the core/engine area
• Familiarity with open-world engine concepts like streaming, memory management and multi-threading
• Ability to debug efficiently on multiple platforms
• Demonstrated ability of strong communication and collaboration on a team

Pluses:

• Experience developing in Python
• Experience developing AAA titles on Xbox One or PlayStation 4 consoles
• Experience with code optimization

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

September 29, 2020: an Ash hat Pikachu code was given out during the stream, find it below!

A live stream held by The Pokémon Company has revealed The Crown Tundra expansion is coming to Pokémon Sword and Shield on October 23. You can also grab a pack including either Pokémon Sword or Shield and both expansions on November 6, this pack is perfect for new fans looking to get the full experience.

The Crown Tundra is the second area unlocked by the expansion pass, with The Isle of Armor being the first. From the trailer, we can see these areas are significantly different geographically, with The Isle of Armor set on a tropical island and The Crown Tundra set near an icy mountain peak. This should lead to some interesting ice-type Pokémon encounters.

This expansion will bring back over 100 Pokémon from previous generations, including Absol, Relicanth, Swablu, and the legendary Regi trio, who have now expanded into a quintet with the additions of the electric-type Regieleki, and the dragon-type Regidrago. Exciting new Galarian forms of the legendary birds, Moltres, Zapdos, and Articuno, will be available to find and catch, along with a brand new legendary, the psychic/grass-type Calyrex.

You can view the stream live right here.

hat Pikachu codes

A series of eight hat-wearing Pikachu was announced during the Crown Tundra live stream. These codes can be redeemed in Pokémon Sword or Shield. Only one code has been revealed as of yet, but this section will be updated when any further codes are revealed!

• Ash hat Pikachu – P1KACHUGET

Newly discovered Pokemon

Brand new Pokémon are coming to the Crown Tundra. During the expansion live stream, the poison/psychic type Galarian Slowking and steel type Gigantamax Melmetal were shown off.

What we know about the Crown Tundra

Much like The Isle of Armor expansion, The Crown Tundra will add an assortment of fresh cosmetic items, such as new winter-themed outfits, and all-new League Card designs to help your character stand out from the crowd.

The first brand new game mode is Dynamax Adventures, a co-op mode where players can explore Pokémon dens. In this mode, you will link up with three other players to search Pokémon dens, and compete in Max Raid battles, which will play out similarly to the base games. The major perk in completing a Dynamax Adventure is the opportunity to catch returning Legendary Pokemon, including Mewtwo, Giratina, Lugia, Ho-Oh, and much more.

The second new mode is The Galarian Star Tournament. You unlock this mode while progressing through The Crown Tundra’s story. In this tournament, you will compete in 2v2 battles against the Galar gym leaders, your rivals, and the Galar champion Leon.

Rumours are currently swirling around the potential release of a Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remaster, but for now The Crown Tundra will have to tide restless fans over till we can get the facts on any future releases.

Today, Microsoft is releasing a new annual report, called the Digital Defense Report, covering cybersecurity trends from the past year. This report makes it clear that threat actors have rapidly increased in sophistication over the past year, using techniques that make them harder to spot and that threaten even the savviest targets. For example, nation-state actors are engaging in new reconnaissance techniques that increase their chances of compromising high-value targets, criminal groups targeting businesses have moved their infrastructure to the cloud to hide among legitimate services, and attackers have developed new ways to scour the internet for systems vulnerable to ransomware.

In addition to attacks becoming more sophisticated, threat actors are showing clear preferences for certain techniques, with notable shifts towards credential harvesting and ransomware, as well as an increasing focus on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Among the most significant statistics on these trends:

• In 2019, we blocked over 13 billion malicious and suspicious mails, out of which more than 1 billion were URLs set up for the explicit purpose of launching a phishing credential attack.
• Ransomware is the most common reason behind our incident response engagements from October 2019 through July 2020.
• The most common attack techniques used by nation-state actors in the past year are reconnaissance, credential harvesting, malware and virtual private network (VPN) exploits.
• IoT threats are constantly expanding and evolving. The first half of 2020 saw an approximate 35% increase in total attack volume compared to the second half of 2019.

Given the leap in attack sophistication in the past year, it is more important than ever that we take steps to establish new rules of the road for cyberspace: that all organizations, whether government agencies or businesses, invest in people and technology to help stop attacks; and that people focus on the basics, including regular application of security updates, comprehensive backup policies and, especially, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA). Our data shows that enabling MFA would alone have prevented the vast majority of successful attacks.

In this blog post I’ll summarize some of the most important insights in this year’s report, including related suggestions for people and businesses.

Criminal groups are evolving their techniques

Criminal groups are skilled and relentless. They have become adept at evolving their techniques to increase success rates, whether by experimenting with different phishing lures, adjusting the types of attacks they execute or finding new ways to hide their work.

Over the past several months, we have seen cybercriminals play their well-established tactics and malware against our human curiosity and need for information. Attackers are opportunistic and will switch lure themes daily to align with news cycles, as seen in their use of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the overall volume of malware has been relatively consistent over time, adversaries used worldwide concern over COVID-19 to socially engineer lures around our collective anxiety and the flood of information associated with the pandemic. In recent months, the volume of COVID-19-themed phishing attacks has decreased. These campaigns have been used for broadly targeting consumers, as well as specifically targeting essential industry sectors such as health care.

In past years, cybercriminals focused on malware attacks. More recently, they have shifted their focus to phishing attacks (~70%) as a more direct means to achieve their goal of harvesting people’s credentials. To trick people into giving up their credentials, attackers often send emails imitating top brands. Based on our Office 365 telemetry, the top spoofed brands used in these attacks are Microsoft, UPS, Amazon, Apple and Zoom.

Additionally, we are seeing attack campaigns that are being rapidly changed or morphed to evade detection. Morphing is being used across sending domains, email addresses, content templates and URL domains. The goal is to increase the combination of variations to remain unseen.

Nation-state actors are shifting their targets

Nation-states have shifted their targets to align with the evolving political goals in the countries where they originate.

Microsoft observed 16 different nation-state actors either targeting customers involved in the global COVID-19 response efforts or using the crisis in themed lures to expand their credential theft and malware delivery tactics. These COVID-themed attacks targeted prominent governmental health care organizations in efforts to perform reconnaissance on their networks or people. Academic and commercial organizations involved in vaccine research were also targeted.

In recent years there has been an important focus on vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure. While we must remain vigilant and continue to increase security for critical infrastructure, and while these targets will continue to be attractive to nation-state actors, in the past year such actors have largely focused on other types of organizations. In fact, 90% of our nation-state notifications in the past year have been to organizations that do not operate critical infrastructure. Common targets have included nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, human rights organizations and think tanks focused on public policy, international affairs or security. This trend may suggest nation-state actors have been targeting those involved in public policy and geopolitics, especially those who might help shape official government policies. Most of the nation-state activity we observed the past year originated from groups in Russia, Iran, China and North Korea.

Each nation-state actor we track has its own preferred techniques and the report details the preferred ones for some of the most active groups.

Ransomware continues to grow as a major threat

The Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others have warned us all about ransomware, especially its potential use to disrupt the 2020 elections. What we’ve seen supports the concerns they’ve raised.

Encrypted and lost files and threatening ransom notes have now become the top-of-mind fear for most executive teams. Attack patterns demonstrate that cybercriminals know when there will be change freezes, such as holidays, that will impact an organization’s ability to make changes (such as patching) to harden their networks. They’re aware of when there are business needs that will make organizations more willing to pay ransoms than incur downtime, such as during billing cycles in the health, finance and legal industries.

Attackers have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to reduce their dwell time within a victim’s system – compromising, exfiltrating data and, in some cases, ransoming quickly – apparently believing that there would be an increased willingness to pay as a result of the outbreak. In some instances, cybercriminals went from initial entry to ransoming the entire network in under 45 minutes.

At the same time, we also see that human-operated ransomware gangs are performing massive, wide-ranging sweeps of the internet, searching for vulnerable entry points, as they “bank” access – waiting for a time that is advantageous to their purpose.

Working from home presents new challenges

We all know that COVID-19 has accelerated the work-from-home trend that was already well underway in 2019.

Traditional security policies within an organization’s perimeter have become much harder to enforce across a wider network made up of home and other private networks and unmanaged assets in the connectivity path. As organizations continue to move applications to the cloud, we’re seeing cybercriminals increase distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt user access and even obfuscate more malicious and harmful infiltrations of an organization’s resources.

It’s also important to address the human element as fundamental to a secure workforce by looking at challenges such as insider threats and social engineering by malicious actors. In a recent survey conducted by Microsoft, 73% of CISOs indicated that their organization encountered leaks of sensitive data and data spillage in the last 12 months, and that they plan to spend more on insider risk technology owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the first half of 2020, we saw an increase in identity-based attacks using brute force on enterprise accounts. This attack technique uses systematic guessing, lists of passwords, dumped credentials from previous breaches or other similar methods to forcibly authenticate to a device or service. Given the frequency of passwords being guessed, phished, stolen with malware or reused, it’s critical for people to pair passwords with some second form of strong credential. For organizations, enabling MFA is an essential call to action.

A community approach to cybersecurity is critical

At Microsoft, we use a combination of technology, operations, legal action and policy to disrupt and deter malicious activity.

As a technical measure, for example, we are investing in sophisticated campaign clustering intelligence in Microsoft 365 to enable security operations center (SOC) teams to piece together these increasingly complex campaigns from their fragments. We also try to make it more difficult for criminals to operate by disrupting their activities through legal action. By taking proactive action to seize their malicious infrastructure, the bad actors lose visibility, capability and access across a range of assets previously under their control, forcing them to rebuild. Since 2010, our Digital Crimes Unit has collaborated with law enforcement and other partners on 22 malware disruptions, resulting in over 500 million devices rescued from cybercriminals.

Even with all of the resources we dedicate to cybersecurity, our contribution will only be a small piece of what’s needed to address the challenge. It requires policymakers, the business community, government agencies and, ultimately, individuals to make a real difference, and we can only have significant impact through shared information and partnerships. This is one of the reasons we initially launched Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report in 2005, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve evolved that report into this new Digital Defense Report. We hope this contribution will help us all work together better to improve the security of the digital ecosystem.

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, Digital Defense Report, email security, IoT, machine learning, network security, phishing, ransomware, security intelligence, security strategies