Security vulnerabilities and the miscreants who take advantage of them are everywhere. With the millions of lines of code contained within software running on a typical network, it's statistically impossible to ever be 100 percent secure from all possible threats. However, a good network administrator pays attention to current trends in network security and takes all the possible precautions to help ensure the network is as secure as it possibly can be. In this chapter, we will take a look at some of the things that can be done to increase the security of your network.
In this chapter, we will cover:
Limiting the attack surface
Securing SSH
Configuring the iptables firewall
Protecting system services with fail2ban
Understanding SELinux
Configuring Apache to utilize SSL
Deploying security updates