Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

Auditing system services

A basic tenet of server administration, regardless of which operating system we're talking about, is to never have anything that you don't absolutely need installed on a server. You especially don't want any unnecessary network services running because that would give the bad guys extra ways to get into your system. And, there's always a chance that some evil hacker might have planted something that acts as a network service, and you'd definitely want to know about that. In this chapter, we'll look at a few different ways to audit your system to ensure that no unnecessary network services are running on it.