Physical System Security

Configure the BIOS to disable booting from CD/DVD, External Devices, Floppy Drive in BIOS. Next, enable BIOSpassword & also protect GRUB with password to restrict physical access of your system.

Disk Partitions

t’s important to have different partitions to obtain higher data security in case if any disaster happens. By creating different partitions, data can be separated and grouped. When an unexpected accident occurs, only data of that partition will be damaged, while the data on other partitions survived. Make sure you must have following separate partitions and sure that third party applications should be installed on separate file systems under /opt.

/
/boot
/usr
/var
/home
/tmp
/opt
3. Minimize Packages to Minimize Vulnerability

 
Do you really want all sort of services installed?. It’s recommended to avoid installing useless packages to avoid vulnerabilities in packages. This may minimize risk that compromise of one service may lead to compromise of other services. Find and remove or disable unwanted services from the server to minimize vulnerability. Use the ‘chkconfig‘ command to find out services which are running on runlevel 3.

# /sbin/chkconfig --list |grep '3:on'
Once you’ve find out any unwanted service are running, disable them using the following command.

# chkconfig serviceName off
Use the RPM package manager such as “yum” or “apt-get” tools to list all installed packages on a system and remove them using the following command.

# yum -y remove package-name
# sudo apt-get remove package-name