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

Viewing and managing log files using Logcheck


As an administrator, while checking for malicious activity on the system or any software issue, log files play a very important role. However, with the increasing number of software, the number of log files being created has also increased. This makes it very difficult for an administrator to analyze log files properly.

In such scenarios, Logcheck is a really nice tool that's available to help administrators in analyzing and scanning log files. Logcheck scans the logs for interesting lines as per its documentation.

These interesting lines"mainly refer to the security issues detected by the tool.

Getting ready

No specific requirements are needed to use Logcheck on a Linux system.

How to do it...

In this section, we will see how to install and configure Logcheck so that we can use it, as per our requirements:

  1. The first step is to install the package using the following command:
  1. During installation, a window will open showing information about selecting...