System hardening and defense

[WWJudasD]

I was wondering if any efforts have been made to the Backtrack OS itself to harden it against attacks. A list of features and tools would be wonderful, but I wasn't sure if one was available.

The dilemma I have for upgrading to BT4, which is already kind of a foregone conclusion for me, is that I'm not sure what differentiates BT4 from Ubuntu with several useful tools prepackaged, a shiny interface, and what I think of as a separate "keychain of trust." A list of features would be helpful.

[xorred]

you're the one who is supposed to protect your OS from intruders. Hardening a distribution makes it unpleasant experience for users who don't care about hardening and it limits usability in many cases. So ... you can just enable ufw as a start, use only certificate auth for sshd, then move on to deeper hardning, if you need it.

[KMDave]

You could check the Wiki for a list of tools provided by BT and you could also check out the dev's blog for a featurelist.

[m-1-k-3]

I was wondering if any efforts have been made to the Backtrack OS itself to harden it against attacks. A list of features and tools would be wonderful, but I wasn't sure if one was available.

you can find lots of hardening tutorials in the net, for example ...

http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/checklist/index.html

there is a nice tool called lynis ...

http://www.rootkit.nl/projects/lynis.html

m-1-k-3