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Protecting the Root Account

The root account is one of the greatest vulnerabilities of Linux and Unix operating systems because the root account is all-powerful: root can create, read, modify, and delete any file in the system or enable or disable any resource or service. Because the root account is so powerful, the default protection for the account—a simple password—should be considered inadequate in most cases.

Fortunately, a relatively simple change to the security surrounding the root account can greatly increase the overall security of your Linux system. The change in question is the use of the wheel group to protect the su command. The wheel group is a special group whose members, by convention, are the only users given access to the ...