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

Using ausearch and aureport to read logs


In the previous section, we have seen how the auditd tool can be used to define rules and keep watch on particular files and directories.

To retrieve data from the auditd log files, we can use the ausearch tool and by using aureport, we can generate reports based on these logs.

ausearch is a command-line tool that is used to search the log files of the auditd daemon on the basis of events and other search criteria.

Similary, aureport is also a command-line tool that helps in creating useful summary reports from the log files of the audidt daemon.

Getting ready

When we install the auditd daemon, it will also install the ausearch and aureport tool along with it. So no extra installation is needed to use these tools.

How to do it...

In this section, we will see how to use ausearch and aureport tools to read the log files of the auditd daemon and create reports from them:

  1. The default location to find the logs of auditd is /var/log/audit/audit.log. If we view...