How to harden CentOS 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 & Amazon Linux for better security

A few years ago I wrote a quite popular post for security hardening on Ubuntu 14.04, and now here’s a new version for CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. Much of it should apply to CentOS/RHEL versions 6 and 8, with some tweaks required here and there. It should also largely work with Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2, although again some tweaks will be required for those.

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69 useful Terminal/CLI commands

For a long time I’ve maintained a memory aid in the form of a list of useful commands which can be used on the command line for Linux, macOS (OS X), BSD, Solaris, etc., so I thought I’d list them in a sticky blog post in case they come in useful for others. Most of these will run on any Unix-type operating system, though I’ve usually indicated where a command is OS-specific. These can be run manually for admin purposes and also scripted for automation purposes.

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Script to detect MAC addresses of new devices connecting to local network

I wanted to get notified of any new machines connecting to my local network so that I could be reasonably sure there would be no unauthorised devices connecting wirelessly to use my network for unknown and potentially malicious purposes. I therefore wrote a simple script to detect new MAC addresses appearing on the network and notify me accordingly. The script requires nmap to be installed and should ideally be run from cron with the output going to a valid email account. The script can be obtained from my GitHub.