Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Third Edition

By : Donald A. Tevault
3.7 (7)
Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Third Edition

3.7 (7)
By: Donald A. Tevault

Overview of this book

The third edition of Mastering Linux Security and Hardening is an updated, comprehensive introduction to implementing the latest Linux security measures, using the latest versions of Ubuntu and AlmaLinux. In this new edition, you will learn how to set up a practice lab, create user accounts with appropriate privilege levels, protect sensitive data with permissions settings and encryption, and configure a firewall with the newest firewall technologies. You’ll also explore how to use sudo to set up administrative accounts with only the privileges required to do a specific job, and you’ll get a peek at the new sudo features that have been added over the past couple of years. You’ll also see updated information on how to set up a local certificate authority for both Ubuntu and AlmaLinux, as well as how to automate system auditing. Other important skills that you’ll learn include how to automatically harden systems with OpenSCAP, audit systems with auditd, harden the Linux kernel configuration, protect your systems from malware, and perform vulnerability scans of your systems. As a bonus, you’ll see how to use Security Onion to set up an Intrusion Detection System. By the end of this new edition, you will confidently be able to set up a Linux server that will be secure and harder for malicious actors to compromise.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting up a Secure Linux System
9
Section 2: Mastering File and Directory Access Control (DAC)
12
Section 3: Advanced System Hardening Techniques
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Using Security Onion

Security Onion consists of a set of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) tools that you can install on your own local Linux machine. It’s also offered as a pre-built Linux distro image, which is really the preferred method of installation. In the previous editions of this book, I showed you the original version of Security Onion, which was built on Xubuntu Linux. This version had a graphical desktop interface, used Snort 2 as the IDS, and included several graphical front-ends for Snort. The new Security Onion 2 is a completely different animal. It’s now built on a text-mode installation of CentOS 7, and offers way more functionality over the original version. In addition to using it as an IDS/IPS, you can now use it as a forensics analyzer, a log file aggregator, and a log file analyzer. For log file collection and analysis, it includes the ELK stack.

ELK stands for Elastic Search, Logstash, and Kibana. Logstash, used with the appropriate...