If you are looking to secure a home machine, a few things worth doing:

USERS
Don't let them use root, disable shell access, make yourself a member of the 
wheel group so only you can use su.

INTERNET
To protect yourself from snoopers on the internet and assuming you have no 
services you wish to expose, set up iptables to drop any packets from sources 
you did not instigate. So your input and forward tables are set up as

DROP       all  --  anywhere             anywhere           state INVALID,NEW

This is a very simple and very effective firewall.

ANTI VIRUS
Look at clamav. You can integrate it into mail system and update daily. I have 
used it for a couple of years and its very good. I have NEVER seen a linux 
virus but I dutifully virus scan all my mail anyway.

GENERAL
Have a look at the Bastille script. It runs through security checks on your 
system and explains what each involves. Nessus is another possibility. 
Disable any service you don't need, use  nmap -sT -O localhost to see what 
you have open. Finally get yourself a decent backup strategy... hardware 
failure worries me much more than hackers or virus's.

Kevin.




On Tuesday 1 February 2005 16:39, Dmitry S. Makovey wrote:
>On February 1, 2005 09:03 am, Tamas Sarga wrote:
>> On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, myang wrote:
>> > Where should I begin from? What should I do to secure my system?
>> >
>> > MF
>>
>> There is a good doc on gentoo.org:
>> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-security.xml
>>
>> You should read some docs on iptables.org, they have a good
>> tutorial.
>>
>> And my 0.02$. Do not give shell account but who really needs it and
>> who can handle the responsibility of it (not use $PASSW=$USER, not
>> note the password to a yellow sticky paper, and so on). Shell
>> account is a very sensitive thing.
>
>100% with you. But it looks like we're speaking of home machine so I
>don't think shell accounts apply here.


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