Roadmap of the Book

Like a regular cookbook, ours is designed to be opened anywhere and browsed. The recipes can be read independently, and when necessary we provide cross-references to related recipes by number: for example, the notation [3.7] means "see Chapter 3, Recipe 7."

The chapters are presented roughly in the order you would use them when setting up a new Linux system. Chapter 1, covers the first vital, security-related activity after setup, taking a snapshot of your filesystem state. From there we discuss protecting your system from unwanted network connections in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.

Once your system is snapshotted and firewalled, it's time to add users. Recipes for login security are found in Chapter 4. And in case you need to share superuser privileges with multiple users, we follow with Chapter 5.

Now that you have users, they'll want to secure their own network connections, files, and email. Recipes for these topics are presented in Chapter 6, Chapter 7, and Chapter 8, respectively.

Finally, as your system happily chugs away, you'll want to watch out for attacks and security holes. Chapter 9, is a grab-bag of recipes for checking your filesystem, network traffic, processes, and log files on an ongoing basis.