Product: 1590594444

The book starts with the basics of hardening a Linux system to prevent purposeful attack as well as the inadvertently harm some users may cause. This basic section includes booting securely, securing virtual consoles, passwords, groups, users, authentication modules, package management, hardening your kernel, and removing development tools that are not needed.

Of course no book on hardening a system would be complete without discussing how to build an effective firewall. The section on firewalling is excellent and strikes a solid balance between a technical presentation and a user level presentation.

Other important areas include securing connections, secure remote administration, public-key encryption, securing files and file systems, mounting drives securely, securing removable drives, encrypting the file system, and file integrity using tripwire.

Of course setting all of that security up helps a lot but you still need to test the system to see that it works the way you want it to. The author examines several security testing tools to scan your system for root kits and weak passwords as well as using packet sniffers, the Snort intrusion detection system, and other tools.

The book assumes some very basic familiarity with Linux including a file editor, the grep utility, file permissions and ownership, user administration, package management, the purpose and layout of init and init scripts, the basics of networking (TCP/IP, subnetting, etc.), and mounting and unmounting a partition. Hardening Linux is a highly recommended book and provides a better overall view of Linux security than most similar choices.
Rating: 5
1590594444
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