Locking down the root acount, using SSH keys, installing fail2ban, and setting up a basic firewall are all things we should be doing in the first five minutes on a new server. After these basics, what other steps do you take to harden your servers? Are there security utilities that you consider essential? Have you implemented any intrusion detection?
Let’s share what’s on our server security check lists.
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I usually recommend people to follow “CIS Security Benchmarks”, for example for Ubuntu 14.04
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While they might not be the first things that come to mind when thinking about security, monitoring and logging can play an important in role. Often no one notices when a system is initially compromised. The Linux Auditing System is one powerful tool that provides an audit trail for actions that occur on a server allowing you to notice when something out of the ordinary happens. Other useful software for monitoring your servers include Nagios and Prometheus. Both can alert you when resource usage like bandwidth is abnormal. As your infrastructure becomes more complex, setting up centralized logging allows you to search and visualize your logs all in one place. The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) is a popular solution for this.
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