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

Copying files remotely


Managing a system remotely is great using SSH. However, many do not know that SSH can also help in uploading and downloading files remotely.

Getting ready

To try the file transfer tools, we need two Linux systems that can ping each other. We also need the  OpenSSH package to be installed on one system and the SSH server should be running.

How to do it...

Linux has a collection of tools that can help in transferring data between networked computers. We will see how a few of them work in this section:

  1. Suppose we have a myfile.txt file on the local system that we want to copy to the remote system. The command to do so as follows:
scp myfile.txt [email protected]:~Desktop/

Here, the remote location where the file will be copied is the Desktop directory of the user account being used to connect.

  1. When we check on the remote SSH system, we can see that the myfile.txtfile has been copied successfully:
  1. Now let's suppose we have a directory,  mydata in the local system, that we...