Backing up files and directories is relatively easy; databases, however, have some special quirks that you need to address. Our examples use MySQL, but the same principles apply to PostgreSQL and other relational databases.
This article is excerpted from O'Reilly's recently published book Linux System Administration .
Rootsh is a shell that logs everything a root user sees on his terminal. This is useful if you have more than one system administrator for a server and you want a record of exactly what any given user does. Despite the fact that the latest rootsh release was in March 2005, it still does its job great.
Late at night, a system administrator performed a routine check of a crashed server, one of 48 systems comprising a major online infrastructure that generated about $4 million per month in revenue. He was a bit surprised that the system had gone down, as it had been humming for months without any indication of being prone to crashing. The check uncovered three encrypted files. The administrator called on MANDIANT to analyze them.
Deployment of products that transform physical servers into "virtual machines" has resulted in nothing short of a data centre revolution. But virtualization of everything from operating systems to applications increasingly has critics asking: Where's the security?
"Traffic is going from virtual machine to virtual machine," points out Neil MacDonald, vice president of research firm Gartner. "Where's the monitoring, the intrusion-detection and protection?"
Jailing is a mechanism to virtually change a system's root directory. By employing this method, administrators can isolate services so that they cannot access the real filesystem structure. You should run unsecured and sensitive network services in a chroot jail, because if a hacker can break into a vulnerable service he could exploit your whole system. If a service is jailed, the intruder will be able to see only what you want him to see -- that is, nothing useful. Some of the most frequent targets of attack, which therefore should be jailed, are BIND, Apache, FTP, and SSH. SSHjail is a patch for the OpenSSH daemon. It modifies two OpenSSH files (session.c and version.h) and allows you to jail your SSH service without any need for SSH reconfiguration.
It's about 2 and a half years since the standards bodies threw up their hands and left SMTP authentication to the industry. Implementation progress has been slow but positive. And there have been some surprises.
Companies in a rush to deploy virtualization technologies for server consolidation efforts could wind up overlooking many security issues and exposing themselves to risks, warns research firm Gartner.
“Virtualization, as with any emerging technology, will be the target of new security threats,” said Neil MacDonald, a vice president at Gartner, in a published statement. MacDonald will be presenting a detailed analysis of the security ramifications of virtualization at the upcoming Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco later this month.
Computer security is a precarious business both from a product development and administrative standpoint. Operating system vendors are forced to constantly patch their software to keep consumers protected from the latest digital threats. But which operating systems are the most secure? A recent report by Symantec hints that Windows currently presents fewer security holes than its commercial competitors.
NSA has developed and distributed configuration guidance for operating systems. These guides are currently being used throughout the government and by numerous entities as a security baseline their systems.
Source: SearchSecurity.com - Posted by Eckie Silapaswang
A security expert is warning database administrators about a continued loophole in database communication protocols that would allow an attacker to bypass access controls and gain access to critical files.
