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

Looking at Snort and Security Onion


Snort is a NIDS, which is offered as a free open source software product. The program itself is free of charge, but you'll need to pay if you want to have a complete, up-to-date set of threat detection rules. Snort started out as a one-man project, but it's now owned by Cisco.  Understand though, this isn't something that you install on the machine that you want to protect. Rather, you'll have at least one dedicated Snort machine someplace on the network, just monitoring all network traffic, watching for anomalies. When it sees traffic that shouldn't be there—something that indicates the presence of a bot, for example—it can either just send an alert message to an administrator or it can even block the anomalous traffic, depending on how the rules are configured. For a small network, you can have just one Snort machine that acts as both a control console and a sensor. For large networks, you could have one Snort machine set up as a control console and...