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

Network security monitoring using Security Onion


Security Onion is a Linux-based distribution built for the purpose of network security monitoring. Monitoring the network for security-related events can be proactive, if used to identify vulnerabilities, or it can be reactive, in cases such as incident response.

Security Onion helps by providing insight into the network traffic and context around alerts.

Getting ready

We discussed the process of installing and configuring Security Onion on a system in previous chapters. Having followed those steps, we have an up-and-running system with Security Onion installed on it.

No other prerequisites are needed for using Security Onion.

How to do it...

In this section, we will walk through a few tools included in Security Onion that can help in security monitoring:

  1. Once we are done with the setup of the security tools included in Security Onion, we have to create a user account to use these tools. Open the Terminal and run the following command to create a...