How to modify hosts file on local computer?

Easily edit the host file on Windows, Mac, Linux

The hosts file is a computer file used by an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses.

The hosts file is a plain text file, and is conventionally named hosts. Originally a HOSTS.TXT file and maintained centrally by Stanford Research Institute for the ARPANET, the hosts file predates the Domain Name System, which was first described in 1983 and implemented in 1984.

Prior to DNS, the hosts file was manually edited and served as a table of accessible hosts. It was due the size of the growing Internet and coincident growth of the hosts table that the more robust DNS was embraced and the hosts file supplanted.

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Editing your hosts file will allow you to override the DNS for a domain, on that particular machine.

Can be used to test your site without the test link, prior to going live with SSL, verify an alias site works prior to DNS changes, or for other DNS related reasons.

This causes your local machine only to look directly at the IP specified.

Your hosts file will need to have two entries added that will contain the IP address you want the site to resolve to and the address. Adding the below two lines for example will point www.yourtesturl.com and yourtesturl.com to our current PHP5-ITK (“Refreshed” PHP5) cluster:

127.0.0.1  localhost loopback
::1        localhost

or

127.0.0.1 www.yourtesturl.com

127.0.0.1 yourtesturl.com

Below is how to locate and edit the hosts file on several OS platforms. Once the proper domain information is added you will save the file and your system will begin resolving to the specified IP. Once testing is finished these entries should be removed.

Contents

 

• Windows 8
• Vista and Windows 7

• Windows NT/2000/XP

• Linux

• Mac OSX 10.0 – 10.1.5

• Mac OSX 10.6 – 10.8

local host file

Windows 8

Editing a HOSTS File in Windows 8

Here is what you can do in order to edit the HOSTS file on Windows 8.

• Copy the HOSTS file from the  C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc folder to your Desktop.
• Open the copy from your Desktop in Notepad, and make all necessary changes.

Or directly open file location from NotePad or other PlainText editor like

 

Windows Vista and Windows 7

Vista and Windows 7 use User Account Control (UAC) so Notepad must be run as Administrator.

1. Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories

2. Right click Notepad and select Run as administrator

3. Click Continue on the “Windows needs your permission” UAC window.

4. When Notepad opens Click File -> Open

5. In the filename field type C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

6. Click Open

 

 

Windows NT/2000/XP

1. Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad

2. Click File -> Open

3. In the filename field type C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

4. Click Open

 

Linux

1. Open a terminal window

2. Type sudo nano /etc/hosts (you can substitute any text editor)

3. Enter your password

 

 

Mac OS X 10.0 – 10.1.5

1. Open /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager.

2. To allow editing the NetInfo database, click the padlock in the lower left corner of the window.

3. Enter your Admin password and click OK

4. In the second column of the browser view, select the node named “machines.” You will see entries for -DHCP-, broadcasthost, and localhost in the third column.

5. The quickest way to create a new entry is to duplicate an existing one. So select the “localhost” item in the third column.

6. Choose Duplicate from the Edit menu. A confirmation alert appears.

7. Click Duplicate. A new entry called “localhost copy” appears, and its properties are shown below the browser view.

8. Double-click the value of the ip_address property and enter the IP address of the other computer.

9. Double-click the value of the name property and enter the hostname you want for the other computer.

10. Click the serves property and choose Delete from the Edit menu.

11. Choose Save from the File menu. A confirmation alert appears.

12. Click Update this copy.

13. Repeat steps 6 through 12 for each additional host entry you wish to add.

14. Choose Quit from the NetInfo Manager menu. You do not need to restart the computer.

 

Mac OS X 10.6 – 10.1.8

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

2. Open the hosts file by typing the following in the Terminal window:

sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

Type your user password when prompted

3. Edit the Host File,The hosts file contains some comments (lines starting with the # symbol), as well as some default hostname mappings (e.g. 127.0.0.1 – local host). Append your new mappings underneath the default ones.

4. Save the Host File, When done editing the hosts file, press Control+x to save the file.

5. Make your changes take effect by flushing the DNS cache with the following command:

$ dscacheutil -flushcache

6. New mappings should now take effect.

 

 

Passwords worth changing ►#Facebook ►#Instagram ►#Pinterest ►#Tumblr ►Google ►Yahoo ►GoDaddy Netflix

Heartbleed Hask: The Passwords You Need Change ASAP.

latest update:

NSA knew about Heartbleed for two years – Bloomberg

The critical “Heartbleed” bug reported earlier this week to have affected the security of most of the internet was discovered by researchers at the United States National Security Agency two years earlier, according to a new report.

On Friday afternoon, Bloomberg News journalist Michael Riley reported that the NSA knew about the monstrous flaw for at least two years ahead of this week’s announcement, but kept it hidden from technologists and instead exploited it to hack the computers and correspondence of certain intelligence targets.

Earlier in the week, the open-source OpenSSL internet security project issued an emergency advisory after discovery of the Heartbleed bug revealed a weakness that may have for years allowed hackers to access online information otherwise thought to be protected by the SSL/TLS encryption standard used by around two-thirds of the web…. more here

Boomberg TV:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/what-and-when-did-nsa-know-about-heartbleed-bug-CcNm~m5ZSzC9GWx4na6L2Q.html

What and When Did NSA Know About Heartbleed Bug?

 

IF you use any of those sites change your password ASAP.

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Facebook	Unclear	Yes	Yes Yes	“We added protections for Facebook’s implementation of OpenSSL before this issue was publicly disclosed. We haven’t detected any signs of suspicious account activity, but we encourage people to … set up a unique password.”
Instagram	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“Our security teams worked quickly on a fix and we have no evidence of any accounts being harmed. But because this event impacted many services across the web, we recommend you update your password on Instagram and other sites, particularly if you use the same password on multiple sites.”
LinkedIn	No	No	No	“We didn’t use the offending implementation of OpenSSL in http://www.linkedin.com or http://www.slideshare.net. As a result, HeartBleed does not present a risk to these web properties.”
Pinterest	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We fixed the issue on Pinterest.com, and didn’t find any evidence of mischief. To be extra careful, we e-mailed Pinners who may have been impacted, and encouraged them to change their passwords.”
Tumblr	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We have no evidence of any breach and, like most networks, our team took immediate action to fix the issue.”
Twitter	No	Yes	Unclear	Twitter wrote that OpenSSL “is widely used across the internet and at Twitter. We were able to determine that [our] servers were not affected by this vulnerability. We are continuing to monitor the situation.” While reiterating that they were unaffected, Twitter told Mashable that they did apply a patch.

Other Companies

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Apple	No	No	No	“iOS and OS X never incorporated the vulnerable software and key web-based services were not affected.”
Amazon	No	No	No	“Amazon.com is not affected.”
Google	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes*	“We have assessed the SSL vulnerability and applied patches to key Google services.” Search, Gmail, YouTube, Wallet, Play, Apps and App Engine were affected; Google Chrome and Chrome OS were not. *Google said users do not need to change their passwords, but because of the previous vulnerability, better safe than sorry.
Microsoft	No	No	No	Microsoft services were not running OpenSSL, according to LastPass.
Yahoo	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began working to fix it… and we are working to implement the fix across the rest of our sites right now.” Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Food, Yahoo Tech, Flickr and Tumblr were patched. More patches to come, Yahoo says.

Email

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
AOL	No	No	No	AOL told Mashable it was not running the vulnerable version of the software.
Gmail	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes*	“We have assessed the SSL vulnerability and applied patches to key Google services.” *Google said users do not need to change their passwords, but because of the previous vulnerability, better safe than sorry.
Hotmail / Outlook	No	No	No	Microsoft services were not running OpenSSL, according to LastPass.
Yahoo Mail	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began working to fix it… and we are working to implement the fix across the rest of our sites right now.”

Stores and Commerce

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Amazon	No	No	No	“Amazon.com is not affected.”
Amazon Web Services (for website operators)	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	Most services were unaffected or Amazon was already able to apply mitigations (see advisory note here). Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EC2, Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon CloudFront were patched.
eBay	No	No	No	“eBay.com was never vulnerable to this bug because we were never running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL.”
Etsy	Yes*	Yes	Yes Yes	Etsy said that only a small part of its infrastructure was vulnerable, and they have patched it.
GoDaddy	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We’ve been updating GoDaddy services that use the affected OpenSSL version.” Full Statement
Groupon	No	No	No	“Groupon.com does not utilize a version of the OpenSSL library that is susceptible to the Heartbleed bug.”
Nordstrom	No	No	No	“Nordstrom websites do not use OpenSSL encryption.”
PayPal	No	No	No	“Your PayPal account details were not exposed in the past and remain secure.” Full Statement
Target	No	No	No	“[We] launched a comprehensive review of all external facing aspects of Target.com… and do not currently believe that any external-facing aspects of our sites are impacted by the OpenSSL vulnerability.”
Walmart	No	No	No	“We do not use that technology so we have not been impacted by this particular breach.”

Videos, Photos, Games & Entertainment

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Flickr	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began working to fix it… and we are working to implement the fix across the rest of our sites right now.”
Hulu	No	No	No	No comment provided.
Minecraft	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We were forced to temporary suspend all of our services. … The exploit has been fixed. We can not guarantee that your information wasn’t compromised.” More Information
Netflix	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“Like many companies, we took immediate action to assess the vulnerability and address it. We are not aware of any customer impact. It’s a good practice to change passwords from time to time, now would be a good time to think about doing so. “
SoundCloud	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	SoundCloud emphasized that there were no indications of any foul play and that the company’s actions were simply precautionary.
YouTube	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes*	“We have assessed the SSL vulnerability and applied patches to key Google services.” *Google said users do not need to change their passwords, but because of the previous vulnerability, better safe than sorry.

Financial

All the banks we contacted (see below) said they were unaffected by Heartbleed, but U.S. regulators have warned banks to patch their systems.

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
American Express	No	No	No	“There was no compromise of any customer data. While we are not requiring customers to take any specific action at this time, it is a good security practice to regularly update Internet passwords.”
Bank of America	No	No	No	“A majority of our platforms do NOT use OpenSSL, and the ones that do, we have confirmed no vulnerabilities.”
Barclays	No	No	No	No comment provided.
Capital One	No	No	No	“Capital One uses a version of encryption that is not vulnerable to Heartbleed.”
Chase	No	No	No	“These sites don’t use the encryption software that is vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug.”
Citigroup	No	No	No	Citigroup does not use Open SSL in “customer-facing retail banking and credit card sites and mobile apps”
E*Trade	No	No	No	E*Trade is still investigating.
Fidelity	No	No	No	“We have multiple layers of security in place to protect our customer sites and services.”
PNC	No	No	No	“We have tested our online and mobile banking systems and confirmed that they are not vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug.”
Schwab	No	No	No	“Efforts to date have not detected this vulnerability on Schwab.com or any of our online channels.”
Scottrade	No	No	No	“Scottrade does not use the affected version of OpenSSL on any of our client-facing platforms.”
TD Ameritrade	No	No	No	TD Ameritrade “doesn’t use the versions of openSSL that were vulnerable.”
TD Bank	No	No	No	“We’re currently taking precautions and steps to protect customer data from this threat and have no reason to believe any customer data has been compromised in the past.”
T. Rowe Price	No	No	No	“The T. Rowe Price websites are not vulnerable to the “Heartbleed” SSL bug nor were they vulnerable in the past.”
U.S. Bank	No	No	No	“We do not use OpenSSL for customer-facing, Internet banking channels, so U.S. Bank customer data is NOT at risk.”
Vanguard	No	No	No	“We are not using, and have not used, the vulnerable version of OpenSSL.”
Wells Fargo	No	No	No	No reason provided.

Government and Taxes

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
1040.com	No	No	No	“We’re not vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, as we do not use OpenSSL.”
FileYour Taxes.com	No	No	No	“We continuously patch our servers to keep them updated. However, the version we use was not affected by the issue, so no action was taken.”
H&R Block	No	No	No	“We are reviewing our systems and currently have found no risk to client data from this issue.”
Healthcare .gov	No	No	No	“Healthcare.gov consumer accounts are not affected by this vulnerability.”
Intuit (TurboTax)	No	No	No	Turbotax wrote that “engineers have verified TurboTax is not affected by Heartbleed.” The company has issued new certificates anyway, and said it’s not “proactively advising” users to change their passwords.
IRS	No	No	No	“The IRS continues to accept tax returns as normal … and systems continue operating and are not affected by this bug. We are not aware of any security vulnerabilities related to this situation.”
TaxACT	No	No	No	“Customers can update their passwords at any time, although we are not proactively advising them to do so at this time.”
USAA	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	USAA said that it has “already taken measures to help prevent a data breach and implemented a patch earlier this week.”

Other

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Box	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We’re currently working with our customers to proactively reset passwords and are also reissuing new SSL certificates for added protection.”
Dropbox	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	On Twitter: “We’ve patched all of our user-facing services & will continue to work to make sure your stuff is always safe.”
Evernote	No	No	No	“Evernote’s service, Evernote apps, and Evernote websites … all use non-OpenSSL implementations of SSL/TLS to encrypt network communications.” Full Statement
GitHub	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	GitHub said it has patched all its systems, deployed new SSL certificates and revoked old ones. GitHub is asking all users to change password, enable two-factor authentication and “revoke and recreate personal access and application tokens.”
IFTTT	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	IFTTT emailed all its users and logged them out, prompting them to change their password on the site.
OKCupid	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We, like most of the Internet, were stunned that such a serious bug has existed for so long and was so widespread.”
Spark Networks (JDate, Christian Mingle)	No	No	No	Sites do not use OpenSSL.
SpiderOak	Yes	Yes	No	Spideroak said it patched its servers, but the desktop client doesn’t use a vulnerable version of OpenSSL, so “customers do not need to take any special action.”
Wikipedia (if you have an account)	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We recommend changing your password as a standard precautionary measure, but we do not currently intend to enforce a password change for all users.” Full Statement
WordPress	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	WordPress tweeted that it has taken “immediate steps” and “addressed the Heartbleed OpenSSL exploit,” but it’s unclear if the issue is completely solder. When someone asked Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’ founding developer, when the site’s SSL certificates will be replaced and when users will be able to reset passwords, he simply answered: “soon.”
Wunderlist	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“You’ll have to simply log back into Wunderlist. We also strongly recommend that you reset your password for Wunderlist.” Full Statement

Password Managers

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
1Password	No	No	No	1Password said in a blog post that its technology “is not built upon SSL/TLS in general, and not upon OpenSSL in particular.” So users don’t need to change their master password.
Dashlane	Yes	Yes	No	Dashlane said in a blog post users’ accounts were not impacted and the master password is safe as it is never transmitted. The site does use OpenSSL when syncing data with its servers but Dashlane said it has patched the bug, issued new SSL certificates and revoked previous ones.
LastPass	Yes	Yes	No	“Though LastPass employs OpenSSL, we have multiple layers of encryption to protect our users and never have access to those encryption keys.” Users don’t need to change their master passwords because they’re never sent to the server. But passwords for other sites stored in LastPass might need to be changed.

Change Your Websites Passwords — be glad you still can

change your password – Heartbleed Bug

How To Protect Yourself From The Massive Security Flaw That’s Taken Over The Internet

 

On April 07, 2014 a severe vulnerability in OpenSSL was announced.
If you are receiving this announcement, then you have at least one server with  that may be vulnerable to a serious security flaw.
Known formally as TLS heartbeat read overrun (CVE-2014-0160), and dubbed the “Heartbleed Bug”, this flaw allows for the theft of information normally protected by SSL/TLS encryption. Specifically, the Heartbleed Bug allows memory to be read on systems using OpenSSL 1.0.1 before 1.0.1g, which can compromise private/secret keys used to encrypt data and application traffic. At the very least, this would allow attackers to impersonate users and services, and provide a means for data theft. Unless automatic updating has been disabled, a patch has been downloaded for your system and a system reboot is required to complete the process. We encourage you to reboot your server as soon as possible to ensure your system is secure.

Beginning April 10, 2014 we will be updating and rebooting servers which are found to still be vulnerable to the Heartbleed Bug. Due to the nature of this vulnerability, and the volume of servers eligible for the update, we cannot accommodate requests for a specific reboot time. You may opt out of a server reboot, should you plan to apply the update yourself, by simply opening a ticket at your server provider. If you opt out, Liquid Web will assume that you’ve appropriately patched your servers. For further information on the OpenSSL Heartbleed Bug

In case the Heartbleed bug’s name hasn’t already convinced you of the seriousness of this security vulnerability, allow me to make this clear: you should change the password you use for every website you’ve visited in the last two years.

That message has been repeated ad nauseum since the vulnerability was first revealed earlier this week..

Tumblr has asked its users to change their passwords. Mozilla has advised FireFox users who rely on the same password for multiple sites to do the same. So have the New York Times, the Wire, and countless other news sites. Again, in case the bleeding heart metaphor wasn’t enough to convince you that this is a real problem: change all of your passwords. Now.

That’s easier said than done, of course. While there are various tools that can generate strong passwords and keep them in sync across multiple platforms, there isn’t an “Oh shit!” button that can automatically reset all of those passwords when something like this happens. It’s up to you to remember all of the websites you’ve visited, the passwords you used for those sites, and to create new passwords that anyone knowing your old ones won’t be able to guess. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: having to manually change the passwords could help protect against any potential flaws hiding in the generators used by tools like 1Password or LastPass. (Note: I’m not saying the tools have flaws, I’m just saying they hypothetically could, company representatives.)

 

What is the Heartbleed bug?

Heartbleed is a flaw in OpenSSL, the open-source encryption standard used by the majority of websites that need to transmit the data that users want to keep secure. It basically gives you a secure line when you’re sending an email or chatting on IM.

Encryption works by making it so that data being sent looks like nonsense to anyone but the intended recipient.

Occasionally, one computer might want to check that there’s still a computer at the end of its secure connection, and it will send out what’s known as a heartbeat, a small packet of data that asks for a response.

Because of a programming error in the implementation of OpenSSL, the researchers found that it was possible to send a well-disguised packet of data that looked like one of these heartbeats to trick the computer at the other end into sending data stored in its memory.

The flaw was first reported to the team behind OpenSSL by Google security researcher Neel Mehta, and independently found by security firm Codenomicon. According to the researchers who discovered the flaw, the code has been in OpenSSL for about two years, and using it doesn’t leave a trace.

How bad is that?

It’s really bad. Web servers can keep a lot of information in their active memory, including usernames, passwords, and even the content that users have uploaded to a service. According to Vox.com’s Timothy Lee, even credit-card numbers could be pulled out of the data sitting in memory on the servers that power some services.

But worse than that, the flaw has made it possible for hackers to steal encryption keys — the codes used to turn gibberish-encrypted data into readable information.

With encryption keys, hackers can intercept encrypted data moving to and from a site’s servers and read it without establishing a secure connection. This means that unless the companies running vulnerable servers change their keys, even future traffic will be susceptible.

Am I affected?

Probably, though again, this isn’t simply an issue on your personal computer or your phone — it’s in the software that powers the services you use. Security firm Codenomicon reports:

You are likely to be affected either directly or indirectly. OpenSSL is the most popular open source cryptographic library and TLS (transport layer security) implementation used to encrypt traffic on the Internet. Your popular social site, your company’s site, commercial site, hobby site, sites you install software from or even sites run by your government might be using vulnerable OpenSSL.

According to a recent Netcraft web server survey that looked at nearly 959,000,000 websites, 66% of sites are powered by technology built around SSL, and that doesn’t include email services, chat services, and a wide variety of apps available on every platform.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/heartbleed-bug-explainer-2014-4#ixzz2yPGdgb5W

The good news is that passwords for services like Facebook and Gmail can be changed. It would be much harder to protect against compromised biometric security measures — what are you gonna do, burn your finger tips and tattoo some new patterns onto them?