Ramón J. Hontañón
With the advent of the Internet revolution came the ability of hundreds of geographically dispersed software developers to collaborate on projects that would had been inconceivable just years before. It was the fall of 1991, and while the Internet hadn’t yet become the household name that it is today, a global team of talented software junkies was hard at work crafting what would become the most successful public-domain software offering of all time: the Linux operating system. Ten short years after the first 0.x release, the “Volkswagen of operating systems” enjoys an increasingly strong foothold in the workstation marketplace and stands above all other server platforms as one of the most robust, and certainly the most cost-effective, operating systems.
Ironically, the same Internet explosion that helped usher in the development of the Linux operating system is also to blame for the climate of lawlessness that has forced network administrators to re-examine their network security postures. As corporations large and small look to the Internet as a necessary way to conduct business, network managers become instant security experts, and what once was the distant threat of malicious intrusion is now the order of the day.
While there is no such thing as a secure network server, the Linux operating system was designed with a strong focus on security, and its open-source nature allows administrators, developers, and end users to constantly audit it for vulnerabilities. It’s precisely this ability to look “under the hood” that makes Linux the platform of choice in environments where security is just as important as high availability and ironclad stability.
This book concentrates on what it takes to make your Linux servers as secure as possible, and how to ensure that your servers continue to be secure, even in the face of the evermutating array of malicious threats that plague the Internet today. It contains practical, step-by-step advice on how to harden a Linux installation, starting with a “stock” distribution using freely available software tools. The tips and techniques described in this book are equally relevant to installations of one or one thousand Linux servers. The advice that you’ll find here is the result of over ten years of experience that includes Linux systems, large-scale TCP/IP network administration, security consultation, and security product development for a leading Internet service provider.
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