Linux System Security Audit with Lynis

Hi,

Every crucial system needs to be regularly audited and hardened. To help a system administrator to perform the task there is a great tool called Lynis. In this article, I am going to explain how to install the tool. The hardening is a straight forward process. All we need to do is to follow the script suggestions.

Disclaimer: Blindly following the script’s suggestions without understanding the possible impact on your system can result in crippling it.

Perform the operations down below as root.

yum install -y git bind-utils

mkdir ~/downloads

cd ~/downloads

git clone https://github.com/CISOfy/lynis.git

cd ~/downloads/lynis

chmod 755 lynis

./lynis update info

./lynis audit system

Wait for a couple of minutes for the script to finish, and follow the recommendations under “Warnings” and “Suggestions” sections and remember – this is just a script; it can’t think and some recommendations might be false or excessive.