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

The advantages of using sudo


Used properly, the sudo utility can greatly enhance the security of your systems, and it can make an administrator's job much easier. With sudo, you can do the following:

  • Assign certain users full administrative privileges, while assigning other users only the privileges they need to perform tasks that are directly related to their respective jobs.
  • Allow users to perform administrative tasks by entering their own normal user passwords so that you don't have to distribute the root password to everybody and his brother.
  • Make it harder for intruders to break into your systems. If you implement sudo and disable the root user account, would-be intruders won't know which account to attack because they won't know which one has admin privileges.
  • Create sudo policies that you can deploy across an entire enterprise network even if that network has a mix of Unix, BSD, and Linux machines.
  • Improve your auditing capabilities because you'll be able to see what users are doing with...