A couple years ago I set up a simple brochure-ware site for the School Board in the district here in Brooklyn, hosted on a VPS instance on Linode, to publicize the dates of public meetings, meeting minutes, etc. The VPS doesn't contain any sensitive information so I locked down the ports to 80, 443, and 22, hardened the SSH with measures like fail2ban, kept the system updated every week or so, and called it a day.
Last week, though, the site was compromised. Blowing the instance away and re-creating it from physical backups is not a problem, but in poring through the system to figure out how it was breached I realized both that my own security chops aren't deep enough and that standard best security practices might not be good enough anymore, anyway, given the many vulnerabilities exposed in the last year and realities like the NSA trove that Shadow Brokers leaked.
So the question for the more experienced security professionals in the Soylent community is, can they recommend a good guide and/or site to hone linux security chops and forensic skills that's current?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday June 03 2017, @10:30PM
No, not even full LAMP. It's brochure-ware so no php was necessary and I didn't employ it. Straight-up HTML/CSS. There's no interactivity or database connectivity from the web site. No CMS, no 3rd party plugins.
I set up a mail server using the Perfect Server for Debian on HowtoForge. Apart from those ports and those for HTTP/S, no other openings in the firewall or unnecessary services.
Washington DC delenda est.