Linux Security Techniques

The Linux Security Techniques series introduces the viewers to the various security features found in modern Linux distributions. Topics covered include data encryption, auditing access, SELinux and firewall configuration among others. The series also lightly covers penetration testing to ensure that each security technique is implemented properly.

[SOUND] Hello and thank you, for joining us for this overview on Linux Security Techniques. Don, can you tell us about Linux Security Techniques? >> Yeah, the Linux Security Techniques series, is one that we've kind of custom built in house here at ITProTV. To help expose you to really a lot of the different security features, that are built into the Linux operating system. There are so many great features in there that you can take advantage of that, it's a bit overwhelming. And when you deploy Linux in a production environment, sometimes it's not configured very securely. And if you just knew what the options were, you could really change that, really tighten things down and then harden your servers pretty well. It's really just about awareness. Since that's what this series is all about, is we're gonna walk through a lot of those different features. Show you how they work, how to use them, how to implement them. And by the time you're done watching this series, you got a really good idea of which are the ones that you wanna use, which are the ones you don't wanna use. And how you can use them, to secure your production environment in. Ultimately makes Linux more secured. >> Sounds great. Now, who's the show targeted towards. >> Well this one's really targeted towards server administrators. With server administrators, there's a lot we've got to do to lock down a server. Now most of what we'll cover will actually work for desktops as well. So system administrators. But we don't normally harden desktops as much as we do servers. So we're really focusing on the server side of things. We do almost everything through the command line interface on this one, because we're assuming there's no graphical interface on a server. And implementing all of these different techniques. We're also thinking more in terms of a public server, a server as opposed to the internet, then something that's just on a private and secure network. Those public servers are the ones that are really at risk. So if you're a server administrator and you're responsible for supporting Linux servers that are exposed to the internet, this show is right up your ally. Cuz we're gonna tackle everything that you need to be looking at, to secure those systems. >> Don, is there a certification available for this? >> There's a couple of certifications that are out there but we chose not to follow that, cuz I wanted to focus just on Linux. Most of the certifications out there kinda cover more than one OS, so we just wanted to focus right on Linux. But keep it generic enough where we weren't tied to a single distribution. So we're gonna talk about things like Ubuntu, and Red hat, and CentOS, and how there's little variations between them. But you'll find that the tools we use are common across all three. They're used pretty widely. So we just covered what we felt was important, not necessarily what was an exam objective somewhere. So this is what we call a technical skill. You're learning a skill that most employers are going to assume you have, regardless of whether you're certified or not right along this series. >> And what topics are covered in the show? >> All right, well we tried to cover all the primary ones and this is a bit of a living series, so you'll find that we add more to it over time. But for the core topics. We started monitoring and auditing's securities. We covered things like Journal D and user auditing, file access auditing, fail to banned, SEWID, ESKID, technologies like that and how we watch our systems to make sure that they're safe and secure. That we can detect if something happens is not appropriate. We cover data security like encryption. And that's encryption while the data's in motion or encryption while the data's at rest, ways that we can encrypt an individual file or encrypt an entire disk. Just steps that we can take to protect our data. We take a look at securing services. So one of the things that we can do to lock down services to make sure that if an attacker breaks in and compromises, say, Apache. That they can't then use that as a launch pad that then go and compromise other services. So, we'll learn about and SC Linux and, LXC containers, and other ways that we can isolate services from each other to protect them. And then we'll tackle securing networks, on the networking side there's a lot of choice in the Linux world on how you want to secure it, there's IP tables, there's firewall D, there's TCP wrappers. We'll look at each, we'll kinda talk about the pros and cons and see how to configure them and get them implemented. That's a great example there where you're just gonna pick one, you don't want to run all three, it's a nightmare. So you'll figure out which one works best in your environment and utilize that. And then at the end of the series, we talk about security testing. Security testing is like a real light version of penetration testing. It is not a full blown penetration testing show. But if you're configuring all these security measures, how do you know they worked? How do you know that your file is working the way that you think that it works? How do you know Fail to Ban is blocking user access? How do you know that you've got data that's actually being encrypted, versus just being sent in plain text? We take a look at that. I'll show you how to use a sniffer to determine if traffic is encrypted. I'll show you how to do port scans and a few other like brute force password attacks, so we can test to make sure that our mechanisms are working right. Again, not a full blown penetration testing course, but you gotta know at least a little bit to test to make sure that your defenses are working. And we'll see that right here in Linux Security Techniques as well. >> Thank you Don. So, Linux Security Techniques sounds that can show you'd be interested in. And I'm sure it is, make sure you watch every episode of Linux Security Techniques right here on ITProTV. [SOUND]