Hacking Linux Exposed: Linux Security Secrets & Solutions

• Brian Hatch, James Lee, George Kurtz
• Osborne McGraw Hill
• 0072127732

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This is the Linux specific companion for Hacking Exposed. Note that I said companion: if you are serious about Linux security, you'll want both of these.

Like Hacking Exposed, every subject here is introduced, explained with complete examples, and then suggestions for countermeasures are explained. There are also three interesting case studies presented in the appendices.

However, although very comprehensive, there are things missing here. For example, although this specifically mentions turning off unneeded services (and even has an appendix devoted to how to do that on different versions of Linux), there's no one section that describes the default services and why you might or might not want to turn them off (see Linux Firewalls for good treatment of that). That's not as much of an issue as it used to be for naive administrators because modern distributions come pretty secure out of the box; still, I think it's something that should be covered.

There's little else, if anything, lacking here. It's current enough to cover xinetd and iptables. There's a companion website at http://www.hackinglinuxexposed.com that has source code and other resources.