Hardening Linux

“Hardening” is the process of protecting a system and its applications against unknown threats. Hardening Linux identifies many of the risks of running Linux hosts and applications and provides practical examples and methods to minimize those risks. The book is written for Linux/UNIX administrators who do not necessarily have in-depth knowledge of security but need to know how to secure their networks.

Hardening" is the process of protecting a system and its applications against unknown threats. Hardening Linux identifies many of the risks of running Linux hosts and applications and provides practical examples and methods to minimize those risks. The book is written for Linux/UNIX administrators who do not necessarily have in-depth knowledge of security but need to know how to secure their networks.

In this book, you'll learn how to secure:

• The base operating system and firewall with iptables
• Connections to your hosts
• Fie systems and files
• Email servers
• IMAP and POP servers
• FTP servers

A quick reference of the procedures discussed in each chapter are summarized in Appendix C.

James Turnbull manages the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) at the National Australia Bank. He is also a member of Linux Australia, including sitting on the Executive Council in 2008, and is currently on the committee of Linux Users of Victoria.

James has previously worked as an executive manager for IT security at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CIO of a medical research foundation, manager of the architecture group of an outsourcing company, and in a number of IT roles in gaming, telecommunications, and government.

He is a contributor to a number of open source projects and regularly speaks on topics related to writing, systems administration, and open source technologies.

He is the author of three other books:

• Pulling Strings with Puppet: Systems Administration Made Easy, about the Ruby-based Puppet configuration management tool.
• Hardening Linux, which focuses on hardening Linux bastion hosts including the base operating system, file systems, firewalls, connections, logging, testing your security and securing a number of common applications including e-mail, FTP and DNS.
• Pro Nagios 2.0 focuses on enterprise management using the Nagios open source tool.