Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By : Cesar Bravo
Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By: Cesar Bravo

Overview of this book

Every organization has its own data and digital assets that need to be protected against an ever-growing threat landscape that compromises the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of crucial data. Therefore, it is important to train professionals in the latest defensive security skills and tools to secure them. Mastering Defensive Security provides you with in-depth knowledge of the latest cybersecurity threats along with the best tools and techniques needed to keep your infrastructure secure. The book begins by establishing a strong foundation of cybersecurity concepts and advances to explore the latest security technologies such as Wireshark, Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA), Burp Suite, OpenVAS, and Nmap, hardware threats such as a weaponized Raspberry Pi, and hardening techniques for Unix, Windows, web applications, and cloud infrastructures. As you make progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with several advanced techniques such as malware analysis, security automation, computer forensics, and vulnerability assessment, which will help you to leverage pentesting for security. By the end of this book, you'll have become familiar with creating your own defensive security tools using IoT devices and developed advanced defensive security skills.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Mastering Defensive Security Concepts
7
Section 2: Applying Defensive Security
15
Section 3: Deep Dive into Defensive Security

Securing Unix services

Services are applications that run in the background to perform or support essential Operating System (OS) tasks. There are also services associated with apps or services such as Apache, Structured Query Language (SQL), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and so on.

A lot of services are loaded and enabled by default. However, every service enabled and running represents a potential vulnerability that needs to be considered and managed.

Therefore, to reduce those risks, let's review some of the best practices related to Unix services (plus some additional server setup considerations).

Defining the purpose of the server

A Linux server should be dedicated for a single purpose. For example, a print server, FTP, web server, and so on. This simple task will make hardening efforts easier.

In the past, having dedicated servers was costly and difficult to procure. However, with cloud technologies, having dedicated servers for...