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UNIX Security 101

  • Sep 26, 2003

Unfinished Business

In this article, starting from a high level with a few basic examples, we've established some of the motives for an intrusion. With just this much information, you know how to interpret seemingly innocent misconfigurations in the light of an intruder's goals.

What does it mean to steal processes in UNIX? I'll discuss that fundamental hacker's goal in the next article. We'll consider process theft and privilege escalation techniques. After these two articles, you'll have a lot of background information for examining your machines. Without drowning in a million examples of what can go wrong, you'll have a basic understanding of the motives and primary ways to intrude onto UNIX systems. In part 3, we'll go into more day-to-day details on what's needed to dramatically improve your systems' security.

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Last Update: November 17, 2020