Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

Auditing network services with netstat

The following are two reasons why you would want to keep track of what network services are running on your system:

• To ensure that no legitimate network services that you don't need are running
• To ensure that you don't have any malware that's listening for network connections from its master

The netstat command is both handy and easy to use. First, let's say that you want to see a list of network services that are listening, waiting for someone to connect to them (due to formatting restrictions, I can only show part of the output here. We'll look at some lines that I can't show here in just a moment. Also, you can download the text file with the full output from the Packt Publishing website):

donnie@linux-0ro8:~> ...