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

Blocking country-specific traffic using mod_security


ModSecurity is a web application firewall that can be used for Apache web servers. It provides logging capabilities and can monitor HTTP traffic in order to detect attacks. ModSecurity can also be used as an intrusion detection tool, where we can use it to block country-specific traffic as per our requirements.

Getting ready

Before we start with the installation and configuration of mod_security, we require Apache server installed on our Ubuntu system.

To install Apache on Ubuntu, run the following command:

apt-get update
apt-get install apache2

How to do it...

In this section, we will see how to install and configure the ModSecurity Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block country-specific traffic:

  1. Once Apache has been installed on Ubuntu, the next step is to install ModSecurity by running the following command:
  1. After installing ModSecurity, restart Apache:
  1. To confirm that ModSecurity has been installed successfully, run the following command:

If...