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posted by martyb on Saturday June 03 2017, @02:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the cat-and-mouse-and-dogged-determination dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @01:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @01:06AM (#520039)

    Another thing to do is enable 2FA. On our servers, ssh requires entering a proper TOTP-based password. Read access to the file containing the TOTP secret is blocked to all processes on the machine but one by SELinux. The central database of secrets is next to useless without the inside knowledge of how to turn that into the TOTP secret as well.