How do you secure your new server?

February 10, 2014 13.3k

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kristianwlmn

I'm thinking of moving from shared hosting, to digitalocean (LAMP on Ubuntu), and found this is nowhere like what shared hosting is, where everything else is taken care of for you and you simply upload your site and it's running. While you guys have quite a few great articles on how to set things up, I think there need to be more article on how to secure your new server. Starting from all that needs to be secured / done for the OS, to MySql and PHP and everything else. Obviously, the default installation will be insecure with lots of stuff left open (I assume). I did look around your help files, but could not find anything concrete on securing a server. I hope you can point me to content on securing a Ubuntu based installation, or if you guys haven't written anything this far, I hope someone will. Or, it'd be nice If you could post info here itself. Thanks,

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5 Answers

etel MOD February 13, 2014

We have an article on SQL injection here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-secure-a-cloud-server-against-sql-injection

How To Secure a Cloud Server Against SQL Injection

by Zack Brown

Protect your VPS. An SQL injection takes advantage of lax coding habits, whereby a hostile user submits code to one of your web forms, instead of whatever data you were trying to collect.

kamaln7 MOD February 10, 2014

We have a plethora of articles on securing droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/community_tags/security.

The most important topics you would want to follow are:
- Firewall: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-setup-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-an-ubuntu-and-debian-cloud-server.
- fail2ban: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-protect-ssh-with-fail2ban-on-ubuntu-12-04.

Make sure you also follow https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-12-04 after creating an Ubuntu droplet.

Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 12.04

by Etel Sverdlov

This tutorial covers how to login with root, how to change the root password, how to create a new user, how to give the new user root privileges, how to change the port, and how to disable root login in. This tutorial is written for Ubuntu. When you first create your server, this tutorial explains the first steps you need to take. This tutorial is written for Ubuntu 12.04.

kristianwlmn February 11, 2014

Thanks for those links.

FMCB February 12, 2014

Great tips, Kamal. Thanks a lot.

isn't there an article covers up all security issues, or at least the major matters such as ddos attack, sql injunction, Sensitive Data Tracking and so on....?

fabiorosabm February 11, 2014

Good tips, Kamal. Thanks again.

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