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Linux Security Fundamentals
David Clinton
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eBook - ePub
Linux Security Fundamentals
David Clinton
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About This Book
Linux Security Fundamentals provides basic foundational concepts of securing a Linux environment. The focus is the digital self-defense of an individual user. This includes a general understanding of major threats against individual computing systems, networks, services and identity as well as approaches to prevent and mitigate them. This book is useful for anyone considering a career as a Linux administrator or for those administrators who need to learn more about Linux security issues. Topics include:
- Security Concepts
- Encryption
- Node, Device and Storage Security
- Network and Service Security
- Identity and Privacy
Readers will also have access to Sybex's superior online interactive learning environment and test bank, including chapter tests, a practice exam, electronic flashcards, a glossary of key terms.
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Chapter 1
Using Digital Resources Responsibly
Words of wisdom. Thatâs the message displayed for administrators when they log in for the first time to many Linux distributions. Who said those words first? Aristotle? Kant? Nope. Spider-Manâs uncle. But hey, accept the truth from any source.
While weâll discuss protecting yourself from attack at length later in the book, this chapter is all about responsibilities. Itâs about your responsibilities both as a consumer of computer technologies and as an administrator of computer technologies. Itâs your job to make sure nothing you do online or with your devices causes harm to anyoneâs assets.
How is all this relevant to the world of information technology (IT) and, specifically, to IT security? Computers amplify your strengths. No matter how much you can remember, how fast you can calculate, or how many peopleâs lives you can touch, itâll never come close to the scope of what you can do with a computing device and a network. So, given the power inherent in digital technologies and the depth of chaos such power can unleash, you need to understand how it can all go wrong before you set off to use it for good.
The rest of this chapter will explore the importance of considering how your actions can impact peopleâs personal and property rights and privacy and how you can both ensure and assess the authenticity of online information.
Iâm not a lawyer and this book doesnât pretend to offer legal advice, so weâre not going to discuss some of the more esoteric places where individual rights can come into conflict with events driven by technology. Instead weâll keep it simple. People should be able to go about their business and enjoy their interactions with each other without having to worry about having physical, financial, or emotional injury imposed on them. And you should be ready to do whatever is necessary to avoid or prevent such injuries.
Protecting Personal Rights
These days, the greatest technology-based threats to an individualâs personal well-being will probably exist on one or another social media platform. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other online sites present opportunities for anyone to reach out to and communicate with millions or even billions of other users. This can make it possible to build entire businesses or social advocacy movements in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years back. But, as we all now know, it also makes it possible to spread dangerous scams, political mischief, and social conflict.
As the man said, âWith great power comes great responsibility.â Therefore, you need to be conscious of the possible impact of any interaction you undertake. This will be true not only for your use of your own social media or email/messaging accounts but also for any interactions taking place on sites or platforms you administrate. You could, for instance, be held legally responsible for anonymous comments left on your blog or for the use of email accounts belonging to your organization. It can be a hard balance to achieve. Are your policies unnecessarily allowing damaging content to be published or, alternatively, unfairly restricting innocuous content?
A helpful tool for maintaining perspective in these areas is to apply the grandmother test. Whatâs that? Before posting a message or comment on any online forum, take a minute to read it over one or two more times and then ask yourself, âWould both my grandmothers approve of what Iâve written? Is there anything that would make them uncomfortable?â In other words, ask yourself whether anyone could reasonably feel threatened or bullied by what youâre about to publish. The bottom line is to make generous use of common sense and goodwill.
With typical attention to such details, the social media community has come up with new names to describe each of the nastiest online threats. You should, unfortunately, be familiar with each of them.
Cyberstalking Stalking isnât specific to online activities, but that doesnât make it any less frightening. In general terms, a stalker persistently follows and observes a target, often with the goal of forcing an unwanted reaction. In the online world, cyberstalking can include electronic monitoring of a targetâs online accounts and activities. Harassing cyberstalking can escalate beyond mere monitoring to include threats, slander, and identity theft.
Cybermobbing Mobbing involves large groups of people banding together to engage in bullying behavior. The nature of many social networking platformsâin particular the prevalence of anonymous accounts and the ease by which users can connect to each otherâlends itself to mob formation. Often, all it can take is a single public post expressing an unpopular position and the power of tens of thousands of users can be brought to bear with the goal of making life miserable for the postâs author.
Doxxing Whether you present yourself to the online world using your real name or through an anonymous identity, you certainly donât want your complete personal profile to become public. Considering all the data thatâs already available on the internet, itâs often not hard for people with time on their hands to track down your physical address and private phone numbers. But making such information easily available on popular social media sites with the intention of causing the target harm is wrongâand, in some jurisdictions, also a crime. Victims of public doxxing have experienced relatively mild annoyances like middle-of-the-night pizza deliveries. But the practice has also proven deadly: itâs been used as part of âswattingâ attacks, where people call a victimâs local police department claiming thereâs a violent crime in progress at the victimâs address. More than one doxxer has been imprisoned for what must have seemed like a clever prank.
Protecting Digital Privacy
Your primary concern must always be to secure the data under your control. But have you ever wondered why that is? Whatâs the worst that could happen if copies of your data are stolen. After all, youâll still have the originals, right? Well, if your organization is in the business of profiting from innovations and complex, hard-to-reproduce technology stacks, then the consequences of data theft are obvious. But even if your data contains nothing more than private and personal information, thereâs a lot that can go wrong.
Letâs explore all that by way of posing a few questions.
What Is Personal Data?
Your personal data is any information that relates to your health, employment, banking activities, close relationships, and interactions with government agencies. In most cases, you should have the legal right to expect that such information remains inaccessible to anyone without your permission.
But âpersonal dataâ could also be anything that you contributed with the reasonable expectation that it would remain private. That could include exchanges of emails and messages or recordings and transcripts of phone conversations. It should also include dataâlike your browser search historyâsaved to the storage devices used by your compute devices.
Governments, citing national interest concerns, will reserve the right for their security and enforcement agencies to forcibly access your personal data where legally required. Of course, different governments will set the circumstances defining âlegally requiredâ according to their own standards. When you disagree, some jurisdictions permit legal appeal.
Where Might My Personal Data Be Hanging Out?
The short answer to that question is âProbably a whole lot of places you wouldnât approve.â The long answer will begin with something like âI can tell you, but expect to become and remain deeply stressed and anxious.â In other words, it wonât be pretty. But since you asked, here are some things to consider.
Browsing Histories
The digital history of the sites youâve visited on your browser can take more than one form. Your browser can maintain its own log of the URLs of all the pages youâve opened. Your browserâs cache will hold some of the actual page elements (like graphic images) and state information from those web...