Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Tajinder Kalsi
Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Tajinder Kalsi

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, system security has gained a lot of momentum and software professionals are focusing heavily on it. Linux is often treated as a highly secure operating system. However, the reality is that Linux has its share of security ?aws, and these security ?aws allow attackers to get into your system and modify or even destroy your important data. But there’s no need to panic, since there are various mechanisms by which these ?aws can be removed, and this book will help you learn about different types of Linux security to create a more secure Linux system. With a step-by-step recipe approach, the book starts by introducing you to various threats to Linux systems. Then, this book will walk you through customizing the Linux kernel and securing local files. Next, you will move on to managing user authentication both locally and remotely and mitigating network attacks. Later, you will learn about application security and kernel vulnerabilities. You will also learn about patching Bash vulnerability, packet filtering, handling incidents, and monitoring system logs. Finally, you will learn about auditing using system services and performing vulnerability scanning on Linux. By the end of this book, you will be able to secure your Linux systems and create a robust environment.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface
Index

Monitoring logs using MultiTail


For any system administrator, monitoring the log files is a very tedious task, and if we have to refer more than one log file at the same time to troubleshoot any issue, it becomes even more difficult to keep switching between logs.

For such situations, we can use the MultiTail tool, which we can use to display multiple log files in a single window or shell, and it will show us the last few lines of the log file in real-time.

Getting ready

To use MultiTail, we don't have to set up anything in particular on our Linux system. Only the MultiTail package needs to be installed. This can be done using the following command:

apt-get install multitail

How to do it...

Once the MultiTail tool has been installed, we can start using it as per our requirements using the following commands in this recipe:

  1. If we want to view two log files using multitail, we will run the following command:
multitail /var/log/syslog /var/log/boot.log

We can see that the screen has been split into...