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

Finding rootkits


Servers that are connected to the internet nowadays face a constant daily attacks. As a system administrator, it is recommended you keep a check regularly to ensure that no attacker has been able to get in.

By using different tools, we can keep a check on malware and rootkits, from getting installed on our servers.

Getting ready

There are no specific requirements to use the scanning tools on our Linux system.

How to do it...

In this section, we will see how to install and configure Linux rootkit scanning tools and use as per our requirements:

  1. To begin with, we will install chkrootkit, a classic rootkit scanner for Linux, as shown here:
  1. Once the software has been installed, we can check the path where the software has been installed by running the following command:
  1. Next, we check the Help menu to understand the options that can be used to run the tool:
  1. If we want to see the list of available tests in chkrootkit, we can run the following command:
  1. Now, let's start the scan as shown...