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

Auditing system services with systemctl


Systemd is an init system and also a system manager, and it has become the new standard for Linux systems. To control this init system, we have a central management tool, called systemctl. Using systemctl, we can check services status, manage the services, change their states, and work with their configuration files.

Getting ready

Most of the Linux distributions have implemented systemctl, so it comes preinstalled.

If any particular Linux distribution does not have it preinstalled, this implies that the particular Linux distribution is not using the init system.

How to do it...

In this section, we will discuss how to use the systemctl command to perform various actions on the services:

  1. To confirm if our Linux distribution supports systemctl, we can just run the command systemctl, as shown here:

If we get output as shown here, it confirms that the command is working. If we receive an error, bash: systemctl is not installed, it implies the system does not support...