Red Hat Security: Linux in Physical, Virtual, and Cloud

Risk management is a continuous process of proactively discovering potential risk, assessing facts, and taking action based on the facts to resolve those risks.

Red Hat analyzes threats and vulnerabilities against all Red Hat products every day, and provides relevant advice and updates through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) entries provide a standardized format for reporting and tracking security-related software issues.

You should base your servers on a standard operating environment (SOE) that provides a baseline of the minimum packages that all your systems require, and add only the additional packages that the server applications require.

Every daemon that provides a network service increases the risk of a successful remote attack, so you should not run unnecessary services.

You should not allow root to directly log in to the system using ssh. Instead, require initial login to an unprivileged account that can use sudo or su to become root.

You should consider turning off password-based SSH access and require either key-based authentication or Kerberos for remote logins.