Chris J will be offering his Linux hardening workshop on August 11, from 10 am to 4 pm. The event is free and requires a workshop ticket from Eventbrite. Chris writes:

One of the questions to come out of the Rats and Rogues Career Panel podcast was what as an industry can we do to help those coming up in the ranks behind us. At the time Security Moey and Elizabeth Martin dropped Mock InfoSec interviews.

That was great, I think helping people with interview skills is a big plus. But it doesn’t solve the first problem. Getting or having the skills you need to get the interview. So how do we fix this?

The Michigan Security community (aka MiSec) has and answer for that. MiSec is starting a series of workshops / classes. Some of these will be open source based, which should be able to be taken by any Information Security group and taught at their location without the original instructor.

The first of these will be held at 10am on August 11th, and should last for about six hours or so. During that time attendees will be installing and hardening a Linux system from scratch. When we are done, an attendee should be able to install a Linux distro from a network install media, harden the distro, configure Apache, Mysql, and PHP to be secure, set up a mail server, know how to read the related logs, and install a CMS system.

Hopefully we can get someone to help us pentest the systems, so the users can read the logs and see what an attack is like.

To participate you will need a computer with virtualization software set up. I would suggest pre-configuring the client system’s virtual with at least 10 gig, if you have the space 20 gigs.  If you do not have a system with you, you will not get a lot out of the class. This is a hands on workshop.

Software I will be using is Oracle’s VirtualBox with bridged networking set up for the guest OS. You can use whatever you like as long as you know it. If you’re not familiar with virtual software, I would go with VirtualBox. It’ll run on any system. While VMware is a good choice, I haven’t used it recently and won’t be able to help you set up before the event if you run in to problems.

The event is free but a ticket is required. Get your workshop tickets at Eventbrite.