Mastering Linux Security and Hardening: A practical guide to protecting your Linux system from cyber attacks

Our company makes us take the Security+ exam which is a total joke. Would be much better to just have everyone read this book. One of the two or three best Linux books out there. Well written and full of very useful information.

I have purchased quite a few too many books over the years online after reading reviews and often find out the content is shallow and lacking any depth for a technical volume. I have a back ground of ~7yrs in Security Engineering spaning many domains- I found this book an excellent "read" and phenomenal reference resource. You can absolutely tell the author, Donald, is a true engineer at heart when making follow up comments after a few sections saying "You can do xyz, heres how to do it; though it probably wont mean much if you do". I audibly laughed a few times having been in similar situations knowing Donald most definitely had huge smirk when writing that down. A good portion of the content in the book was known to me and yet I still found I was learning and considering some of my strategies in place presently for tackling issues.I really couldn't recommend this book more to anyone- while it considers you know some intermediate concepts it provides approachable and relatable use cases which are easily replicated or modified.

I've read a TON of networking and Linux books, and this is the first time in a long time that a book has delivered value during the first quick-contents-scan I do upon receipt. Not only did I find two "winners" that I will immediately apply to a customer's network, I understood everything I read immediately - no going back to re-read anything. This book does not suffer from the typical "disarray" that other packt publisher titles suffer from - whether due to multiple authors' disjoint writing styles, or hastily-assembled contents cutting too wide a swath of the technology it purports to cover. This book suffers from neither of those two concerns. The singular author has issued this third edition of his work, and it is coherent and singularly-voiced - with humor and obvious knowledge from which he writes. I am impressed with this book, the author and editor(s) behind it. It is definitely well worth the investment!

Excellent material, good coverage and understandable. Just what I needed to get up to speed and set up an rsyslogserver.

This is the kind of stuff I would like to see as a college course. Of course I'd also like it to be taught by a teacher with real life experience

Information about Secure Boot keys and signing your bootloaders is missing from this book. Other than that it is very educational.

While I do believe that Linux is a more secure platform over all compared to Windows, that does not mean it is impervious to malware or other types of cyber attacks. Just a cursory glance at the website CVE Details will display a fair number of vulnerabilities that score 7.0 and higher for Linux, while a recent Office of Information Security TLP report on the BlackCat ransomware will show that Debian and Ubuntu operating systems are susceptible along with most Windows operating systems, both server and desktop. This is where Donald A. Tevault's latest book, "Mastering Linux Security and Hardening, 3E" from Packt Publishing comes in.This book is aimed at Linux system and security administrators. The text is clearly written, with good explanations of the topics at hand and how-to's scattered throughout each chapter to help drive the points home. It is not a beginners book. If you are just starting your foray into the Linux world, I would suggest reading one of the Ghori or van Vugt books that cover the RHCSA exam. If your work or interests lie more in the Ubuntu/Debian side of Linux, I recommend the excellent "Mastering Ubuntu Server, 4E" from Jay LaCroix also by Packt Publishing. Working through the projects in Jay's book while also following his youtube channel can't help but create a solid foundation.Tevault's book starts where the previously mentioned books stop. Where the RHCSA books give you seven pages that cover the journald firewall (more than enough info for the exam), Trevaualt gives you five times that just to cover ip- and nftables and then follows that with another chapter that covers journald and Ubuntu's ufw firewalls. A chapter on encryption covers the use of GPG for email confidentiality and integrity, encrypting partitions or whole disks, and working with the OpenSSL library and the PKI. On more than one occasion I have been asked in cybersecurity interviews to discuss what I know about encryption, so this section I find very helpful. What I learned in the Access Contol chapters, I never would have thought to google for investigation. I learned something new from every chapter."Mastering Linux Security and Hardening, 3E" sparked many idea's for me on improving my configuration scripts and simpler bash one-offs. I could see using it to update old knowledge base articles. The book also proved quite helpful in providing additional details for common subjects which I thought I knew well. We have all seen the one-star reviews on Amazon with the rant "this all can be found for free online". Not if you don't know what it is you don't know, and this book helps to alleviate that problem.Buy this book, and keep it within arm's reach. It is that good.