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

Using a security checklist for system setup


I've previously told you about OpenSCAP, which is a really useful tool to lock down your system with just a minimum amount of effort. OpenSCAP comes with various profiles that you can apply to help bring your systems into compliance with the standards of different regulatory agencies. However, there are certain things that OpenSCAP can't do for you. For example, certain regulatory agencies require that your server's hard drive be partitioned in a certain way, with certain directories separated out into their own partitions. If you've already set up your server with everything under one big partition, you can't fix that just by doing a remediation procedure with OpenSCAP. The process of locking down your server to ensure that it's compliant with any applicable security regulations has to begin before you even install the operating system. For this, you need the appropriate checklist.

There are a few different places where you can obtain a generic...