Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By : Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA
Book Image

Security Automation with Ansible 2

By: Akash Mahajan, MADHU AKULA

Overview of this book

Security automation is one of the most interesting skills to have nowadays. Ansible allows you to write automation procedures once and use them across your entire infrastructure. This book will teach you the best way to use Ansible for seemingly complex tasks by using the various building blocks available and creating solutions that are easy to teach others, store for later, perform version control on, and repeat. We’ll start by covering various popular modules and writing simple playbooks to showcase those modules. You’ll see how this can be applied over a variety of platforms and operating systems, whether they are Windows/Linux bare metal servers or containers on a cloud platform. Once the bare bones automation is in place, you’ll learn how to leverage tools such as Ansible Tower or even Jenkins to create scheduled repeatable processes around security patching, security hardening, compliance reports, monitoring of systems, and so on. Moving on, you’ll delve into useful security automation techniques and approaches, and learn how to extend Ansible for enhanced security. While on the way, we will tackle topics like how to manage secrets, how to manage all the playbooks that we will create and how to enable collaboration using Ansible Galaxy. In the final stretch, we’ll tackle how to extend the modules of Ansible for our use, and do all the previous tasks in a programmatic manner to get even more powerful automation frameworks and rigs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Ansible Playbooks and Roles
5
Automating Web Application Security Testing Using OWASP ZAP

Scheduled scans using Ansible Tower for operating systems and kernel security


Continuous security scanning requires us to manage it in a software like Ansible Tower. While most of the discussed tools can be used for scanning and maintaining a benchmark for security, we should think about the entire process of the incident response and threat detection workflow:

  1. Preparation
  2. Detection and analysis
  3. Containment, eradication, and recovery
  4. Post-incident activity

Setting up all such scanners is our preparation. Using the output of these scanners gives us the ability to detect and analyze. Both containment and recovery are beyond the scope of such tools. For the process of recovery and post-incident activity, you may want to consider playbooks that can trash the current infrastructure and recreate it as it is. 

As part of our preparation, it may be useful to get familiar with the following terms as you will see them being used repeatedly in the world of vulnerability scanners and vulnerability management...