Major release: Lynis 3.x

After almost a year of work, we are excited to share news about the major 3.x release! It is major for multiple reasons, including the number of submissions from the community and some breaking changes. Some core functions have been rewritten and several new functions were added. Another important area for this release is security. Being a security tool, we want Lynis to be as safe as possible, even though shell script is not specifically known for that. So this […]

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Troubleshooting guide for Lynis

Troubleshooting Lynis This document helps with solving most common issues experienced when running Lynis. Errors No hostid and/or hostid2 found Some systems do not have the OpenSSH server package installed. In this case, the hostid2 value may be missing. During the upload it may result in an error. Error: No hostid and/or hostid2 found. Can not upload report file. To see what Lynis discovered, use the show command. lynis show hostids If the hostid2 is missing, we can tell Lynis […]

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How are auditd and Lynis different?

Differences between auditd and Lynis Recently I received the question what the difference is between auditd and Lynis. Both focus on auditing, that part is clear. For someone not familiar with both software tools, the technical differences may not directly be obvious. Time to write about that, for everyone that has the same question. Comparing functionality Let’s start with a quick introduction in both tools. Audit daemon Auditd is the daemon process in the Linux Audit Framework, written and maintained by […]

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Tools compared: rkhunter VS Lynis

Rootkit Hunter and Lynis compared The question about what the differences are between rkhunter and Lynis is showing up more and more. Time to share the purpose of both and show the difference in its usage. As the author of both tools, I should have done this nine years ago. So with some little delay, here it is. Rootkit Hunter Written in 2003, rkhunter had the goal to detect malware on Linux and UNIX-based systems. The main target was rootkits, with […]

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Why Auditing and Vulnerability Scanning are Different Things

Why Auditing and Vulnerability Scanning are Different Things As the author of Lynis, we hear often the question: It is like Nessus, right? It seems that everything is compared with Nessus, especially when it comes to Linux security. Surprise, it is not. Let’s get things straight, and talk about the benefits of both. Vulnerability Scanning Scanners like Nessus and OpenVAS are great tools. You drop a system in the network and start scanning. The scanner then usually starts with a ping […]

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The Non-Technical Changelog: Insights of 6 Months Development

The Non-Technical Changelog Lessons learned between our last and current release The Lynis project team is proud to announce a new release of our security auditing tool. With months of work and a variety of changes, we bumped up the version to a “zero release” (2.2.0). The technical changelog is included in the download. We consider it to be a stable release, yet ask all to test it first. Being the original author of Lynis, there is an additional background […]

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Tiger is History, Long Live Modern Alternatives!

The History and Alternatives to the Tiger Security Tool Recently I saw some tweets showing up from an old friend: Tiger. Surprised to see it being promoted, as I know the tool for years, but never seen any new releases in the last years. Both are actually a shame. An outdated tool is usually of lower value. Promoting old tools might actually disappoint others and harm the initial trust in the software. History of Tiger In its day, the tool […]

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Find Differences Between Two Daily Lynis Audits

Comparing Lynis Scan Results Lately I saw a great feature request for Lynis, to detect differences between two runs of Lynis. Wouldn’t it be great to run Lynis daily and then see if anything changes and act upon those differences? While our auditing tool doesn’t have such an option itself, it is very easy to implement something and fine-tune it to your needs. Report Lynis has two important files to which is logs data: /var/log/lynis.log /var/log/lynis-report.dat The first file /var/log/lynis.log has […]

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Find the alternatives: CIS-CAT auditing tool

Alternatives to the CIS-CAT auditing tool The Center for Internet Security, CIS for short, is the organization behind several in-depth hardening guides. The quality of these hardening guides is outstanding, with a high level of detail. This high level of detail has one downside: it costs a lot of time to read, try and test the recommendations. Sometimes we simply don’t have the time to do an extensive audit by hand. Let alone the time to actually repeat the auditing […]

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Viewing available test categories in Lynis

Test categories in Lynis When auditing a server, it may be useful to only run a particular category of tests, like firewall related tests. In that case the –tests-category parameter can be used, together with the category name. Available categories To determine what categories are available, Lynis has a built-in parameter –view-categories which lists all available files. Most of the names are self-explanatory on what of tests they include. For more information about the included tests, have a look in […]

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What’s New in Lynis 2: Features

Lynis 2.x Features Lynis 2.x will bring security auditing of Linux and Unix systems to a new level. In this blog post we share some exciting new features. Release of Lynis 2 is planned for February 2015. Overview: History Lynis 2.x Plugins Systemd Support File Integrity Monitoring Containers & Virtualization Operating Systems Focus on Simplicity Free and Commercial Support   History Lynis has been created in 2007, as a follow-up on the well-known tool Rootkit Hunter (rkhunter). Both tools are […]

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Product comparison: Lynis VS Nessus

Lynis VS Nessus Comparison of both products Professionals ask us often how Lynis is different than Tenable Nessus. As the original author of Lynis, let me address that very interesting question.   Different goal Nessus is focused on vulnerability scanning, or in other words, finding weaknesses in you environment. The huge amount of plugins and their actions show that this is the primary focus. Along the way it started to implement others services, like compliance checking. Lynis also detects vulnerabilities, […]

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Alternatives to Bastille Linux: system hardening with Lynis

System hardening with Lynis Many people used Bastille Linux to harden their Linux systems. Unfortunately the website of Bastille seems very outdated, including the tool. This resulted in people searching for a great alternative to replace this tool. We found the alternative by actually combining different solutions, being more powerful. Security automation is hot, so forget Bastille and do it the right way. Automatic hardening makes sense Most system administrators can’t keep up with the new technologies and security threats. […]

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How to create custom tests in Lynis

Custom tests in Lynis Although Lynis has many tests built-in, there are enough reasons to create your own custom tests. Instead of patching up existing files, there is a better way to run them and make use of existing functions. In this article we will have a look on how to create your own tests and what functions can be used. With the software being open source and licensed under GPL, you have the flexibility to see existing tests and […]

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Installation of Lynis on Arch Linux systems

Install Lynis on Arch Linux Tutorial for Lynis installation on Arch Linux Pacman Arch Linux is getting more popular, due to its great community support and the way it is organized. Being a “rolling release” system, it is continuously up-to-date. Of course you want to make sure your security defenses are equally up-to-date, so that’s where Lynis comes in. Normally pacman is used for installing new packages. Unfortunately, the lynis package does not show up. [root@archlinux ~]# pacman -Ss lynis […]

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