Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

By : Donald A. Tevault
Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

By: Donald A. Tevault

Overview of this book

From creating networks and servers to automating the entire working environment, Linux has been extremely popular with system administrators for the last couple of decades. However, security has always been a major concern. With limited resources available in the Linux security domain, this book will be an invaluable guide in helping you get your Linux systems properly secured. Complete with in-depth explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book begins by helping you set up a practice lab environment and takes you through the core functionalities of securing Linux. You'll practice various Linux hardening techniques and advance to setting up a locked-down Linux server. As you progress, you will also learn how to create user accounts with appropriate privilege levels, protect sensitive data by setting permissions and encryption, and configure a firewall. The book will help you set up mandatory access control, system auditing, security profiles, and kernel hardening, and finally cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques to secure your Linux environment efficiently. By the end of this Linux security book, you will be able to confidently set up a Linux server that will be much harder for malicious actors to compromise.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting up a Secure Linux System
8
Section 2: Mastering File and Directory Access Control (DAC)
11
Section 3: Advanced System Hardening Techniques

Introduction to Snort and Security Onion

Snort is an NIDS, which is offered as a free open source software product. The program itself is free of charge, but you'll need to pay if you want to have a complete, up-to-date set of threat detection rules. Snort started out as a one-man project, but it's now owned by Cisco. Understand, though, this isn't something that you install on the machine that you want to protect. Rather, you'll have at least one dedicated Snort machine someplace on the network, just monitoring all network traffic, watching for anomalies. When it sees traffic that shouldn't be there – something that indicates the presence of a bot, for example – it can either just send an alert message to an administrator or it can even block the anomalous traffic, depending on how the rules have been configured. For a small network, you...