Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

By : Donald A. Tevault
Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

By: Donald A. Tevault

Overview of this book

This book has extensive coverage of techniques that will help prevent attackers from breaching your system, by building a much more secure Linux environment. You will learn various security techniques such as SSH hardening, network service detection, setting up firewalls, encrypting file systems, protecting user accounts, authentication processes, and so on. Moving forward, you will also develop hands-on skills with advanced Linux permissions, access control, special modes, and more. Lastly, this book will also cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques to get your work done efficiently. By the end of this book, you will be confident in delivering a system that will be much harder to compromise.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface

Web server scanning with Nikto


OpenVAS, which we just looked at, is a general-purpose vulnerability scanner. It can find vulnerabilities for any kind of operating system or for any server daemon. However, as we've just seen, an OpenVAS scan can take a while to run, and it might be more than what you need.

Nikto is a special-purpose tool with only one purpose. That is, it's meant to scan web servers and only web servers. It's easy to install, easy to use, and capable of doing a comprehensive scan of a web server fairly quickly. And, although it's included in Kali Linux, you don't need Kali Linux to run it.

Nikto in Kali Linux

If you already have Kali Linux, you'll find that nikto is already installed under the Vulnerability Analysis menu:

When you click on that menu item, you'll open a command-line terminal with a display of the Nikto help screen:

Installing and updating Nikto on Linux

Nikto is in the EPEL repository for Red Hat/CentOS, and it's in the normal repository for Ubuntu. Along with the...