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 the auditd daemon


When we talk about securing a system, this it includes many procedures and auditing the system is one of them. The Linux system has a preinstalled tool named auditd, which is responsible for writing audit records on to the disk.

Getting ready

There are no specific requirements to use auditd on a Linux system.

How to do it...

In this section, we will see how to use auditd, for the purpose of auditing:

  1. If the tool is not already installed on our Linux distribution, we can install it by running the following command:
apt-get install auditd
  1. When the package is installed, it also installs a few other tools as part of the installation process. One of the tools installed is auditctl which helps in controlling the behavior of the software and also in adding rules.
  1. We can check the version of the tool by running the following command:
  1. When auditd is installed for the first time, it does not have any rules available yet. This can be checked by running the following command:
  1. Now, let...