[Nolug] Suggestion for a meeting topic

One thing I'd love to learn more about in linux, and I'm sure some of you
can probably shed some light on the subject, is basic white hat hacking and
network security. Explain all the back doors in linux, how you can close
them, set up a firewall, monitor them for intrusions, etc... Maybe even
some general "rules-of-thumb" for system security, such as "never log in as
root", etc... As linux's popularity grows and it starts to infiltrate more
mission-critical roles, securing these systems is going to be of utmost
importance. As we all know, linux has a reputation for being more secure
than windows, which is really misleading, because a system's security is
100% dependant on its administrator, whether it be running *ix or windows...
that reputation probably comes from the fact that linux has always been a
hard OS to set up, so the people that do it tend to be smarter than the
people that set up windows boxes. But, as distributions become easier to
install and manage, we're going to have more and more people opening
themselves up to attacks, simply because they did not know their OS was
running some daemon that they didn't know about, out of the box.

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Received on 08/23/07