Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS security configuration guide

http://www.rationallyparanoid.com/articles/ubuntu-12-lts-security.html

 

None of that is really necessary.
But then, for a site called paranoid ...
Mrk

 

Well no, of course it isn't necessary. It's useful for educational purposes. But that goes to a larger and probably off-topic argument that an educated user is the only secured user. You can't secure what you don't understand, and you can never understand it if you don't screw with the config files, poke at it, break it, and otherwise dig in to the OS.

I would have liked to see a little more explanation as to WHY he recommends disabling the avahi-daemon. Is it just because we don't want any unnecessary daemons running, or is it something specific with multicast? And WHY disable the guest account? Here's a counter-argument for that.

It hadn't occurred to me to run a system monitor as kind of a security mechanism, I liked that idea. And it's good advice to confirm that disk encryption actually worked. Laziness often prevails - when I configure something I don't always double-check it.

Overall it was a fun guide to see how my security sense rates against other security geeks.