This is another area where different Linux distro families do business differently from each other. As we shall see, each distro family comes with different default security settings. A security administrator who oversees a mixed environment of different Linux distros will need to take this into account.

One beautiful thing about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all of its offspring, such as CentOS, is that they have better out-of-the-box security than any other Linux distro. This makes it quicker and easier to harden Red Hat-type systems because much of the work has already been done. One thing that's already been done for us is locking down users' home directories:

[donnie@localhost home]$ sudo useradd charlie
[sudo] password for donnie:
[donnie@localhost home]$

[donnie@localhost home]$ ls -l
total 0
drwx------. 2 charlie charlie 59 Oct 1 15:25 charlie
drwx------. 2 donnie donnie 79 Sep 27 00:24 donnie
drwx------. 2 frank frank...