Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Tajinder Kalsi
Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Tajinder Kalsi

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, system security has gained a lot of momentum and software professionals are focusing heavily on it. Linux is often treated as a highly secure operating system. However, the reality is that Linux has its share of security ?aws, and these security ?aws allow attackers to get into your system and modify or even destroy your important data. But there’s no need to panic, since there are various mechanisms by which these ?aws can be removed, and this book will help you learn about different types of Linux security to create a more secure Linux system. With a step-by-step recipe approach, the book starts by introducing you to various threats to Linux systems. Then, this book will walk you through customizing the Linux kernel and securing local files. Next, you will move on to managing user authentication both locally and remotely and mitigating network attacks. Later, you will learn about application security and kernel vulnerabilities. You will also learn about patching Bash vulnerability, packet filtering, handling incidents, and monitoring system logs. Finally, you will learn about auditing using system services and performing vulnerability scanning on Linux. By the end of this book, you will be able to secure your Linux systems and create a robust environment.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface
Index

Using system tools – stat


While working on Linux, the most commonly used command is ls, which gives a listing of the files in the specified directory. However, it shows only a little information about the files.

Instead, if we use the stat command, we can get more information about the files/directories when compared to using ls. Because stat is able to get information about a file from its inode, it is able to give more information about the files.

Getting ready

Since stat is an built-in command of Linux, nothing else needs to be installed so that we can use it.

How to do it...

This section will explain about the options and usage of the stat" command. By using stat, we can get a detailed status of a particular file or file system.

  1. Suppose we have a file called example.txt. When we do a long-listing of this file using the ls -l command, we get information about the file which includes information about when the file was last modified.

However, when we use the stat command to check details about...