Linux: Ubuntu: Securing the Server

Name: Linux: Ubuntu: Securing the Server
Author: Ranik Thomas

Learn how to secure the Ubuntu Server

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 3 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

Hello, my name is Renique and in the upcoming lessons I will show you several ways to secure your Ubuntu server. In this lesson I will show you how to stop services that you no longer want running. There may be services that are no longer working correctly and you need to stop them or you have services that are no longer needed and you are working to improve the security of your server. So the first thing is you have to be able to see what services are actually running on your system. So to do this we are going to go with sudo service status dash all. So this is showing us all the services that are currently running on this system. The ones with a minus mean that service is stopped. The ones with the plus means that services is currently enabled and running. There are going to be two commands that we can use to start, stop, and restart services. So the first one is the systemctl command. So what we're going to do is we're going to stop the firewall service. So that is the ufw service and we're going to do this with the systemctl command. So to do this we'll go sudo systemctl stop ufw and now if we went back and looked again, so we go up and look at our services again, we will see now that the firewall service is stopped. So we'll go ahead and restart it. So then we can show the other command to be able to stop. Now we check again, make sure it's actually started. Now we see it started again. So now we are going to use the service command to be able to stop the firewall service. So for this one, we go sudo service ufw stop and now if we check it one more time, we see that the firewall is now stopped again. So if there's a particular service where you just want to check that service to make sure it is stopped or running, then you can use the sudo service and just name the service ufw status. So you'll see where it says active next to it. It says it's inactive. So that also lets us know that that service is stopped. So these are going to be the two commands that you can use to stop services on your server that you no longer want running. So this is going to be helpful to help improve that security of your system. So you're not running services that are not being needed or used. In the next lesson, I will show you how to enable fail to ban. Thank you for watching.

Essential Provider : Ranik Thomas 3 Lessons · 15m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

How can you make your system more secure? This is something that is asked every day by all organizations connected to the internet. Security compromises can hurt an organization in a variety of ways, so it’s become important to secure the network and systems on the network as completely as possible. The average costs to an organization that experiences a security breach runs in the millions. Even this number does not account for the reputation hit that the organization receives when a breach has been made public knowledge.

In this course on Securing the Server, you will learn how to discover what services are running on your system and how to close unneeded services to harden your Ubuntu Server. This lesson will describe the Fail2ban intrusion prevention software and how to use it. You will learn how to find the permissions for sudo users and how to adjust those permissions for users and groups that limit what they can do.

What You'll Learn

Discover which services are running on your Ubuntu Server and disable unneeded services to harden the system
Explain Ubuntu services management
Use the Fail2ban intrusion prevention software and describe its benefits
Find and adjust sudo permissions for users and groups to limit what they can do
Understand sudo permissions

Key Takeaways

Securing the network and systems is important because security compromises can hurt an organization in a variety of ways.
The average cost to an organization that experiences a security breach runs in the millions, not counting the reputation hit when a breach becomes public.
Hardening an Ubuntu Server involves discovering what services are running and closing unneeded services.
Fail2ban is intrusion prevention software that can be enabled to help secure the server.
Sudo permissions can be found and adjusted for users and groups to limit what they are able to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to discover what services are running on your system and close unneeded services to harden your Ubuntu Server, how to use the Fail2ban intrusion prevention software, and how to find and adjust sudo permissions for users and groups.

What topics do the lessons cover?

The lessons cover Disabling Unneeded Services, Enabling Fail2Ban, and Managing Sudo Permission.

What skills does this course help develop?

It covers skills including Linux Administration, Linux Security Modules, Linux Servers, Server Administration, Server Hardening, and Web Server Security.

What is Fail2ban?

Fail2ban is intrusion prevention software; the course describes its benefits and how to use it to help secure the server.