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 Nikto for web server scanning


If our Linux server is configured to run as a web server, there is a chance that the web server and the web application hosted on the web server may have vulnerabilities. In such a cases, we can use a web application scanning tool to identify these vulnerabilities, and Nikto is one such open source web scanner.

It can be used with any web server and can scan for a large number of items to detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, risky files, and so on.

Getting ready

To use Nikto to scan our web server, we have to first install it on our system, from where the scan will be done. If we are using Kali Linux, Nikto comes preinstalled in it. For other Linux distributions, we can install the tool using the following command:

How to do it...

In this section, we will see how to use Nikto to examine the web server and report potential vulnerabilities:

  1. To see more details about the options supported by Nikto, we run the following command:
  1. Nikto supports various plugins...