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

Chapter 9. Vulnerability Scanning and Intrusion Detection

There are lots of threats out there, and some of them might even penetrate into your network. You'll want to know when that happens, so you'll want to have a good Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) in place. We'll look at Snort, which is probably the most famous one. I'll then show you a way to cheat so that you can have a Snort system up and running in no time at all.

We've already seen how to scan a machine for viruses and rootkits by installing scanning tools onto the machines that we want to scan. However, there are a lot more vulnerabilities for which we can scan, and I'll show you some cool tools that you can use for that.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

  • An introduction to Snort and Security Onion
  • Scanning and hardening with Lynis
  • Finding vulnerabilities with OpenVAS
  • Web server scanning with Nikto