Lynis - Security auditing tool for Linux, macOS, and UNIX-based systems

Lynis – Security auditing tool for Linux, macOS, and UNIX-based systems

November 19, 2016July 27, 2019 Comments Off

Lynis is a security auditing for UNIX derivatives like Linux, macOS, BSD, and others. It performs an in-depth security scan and runs on the system itself. The primary goal is to test security defenses and provide tips for further system hardening. It will also scan for general system information, vulnerable software packages, and possible configuration issues. Lynis was commonly used by people in the “blue team” to assess the security defenses of their systems. Nowadays, penetration testers also have Lynis in their toolkit.

We believe software should be simple, updated on a regular basis, and open. You should be able to trust, understand, and have the option to change the software. Many agree with us, as the software is being used by thousands every day to protect their systems.

Goals

The main goals are:

Automated security auditing
Compliance testing (e.g. ISO27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA)
Vulnerability detection

The software (also) assists with:

Configuration management
Software patch management
System hardening
Penetration testing
Intrusion detection

Audience

Typical users of the software:

System administrators
Auditors
Security officers
Security professionals

Installation

Git

Clone or download the project files (no compilation nor installation is required) ;
```
git clone https://github.com/CISOfy/lynis
```
Execute:
```
./lynis audit system
```

If you want to run the software as root, we suggest changing the ownership of the files. Use chown -R 0:0 to recursively alter the owner and group and set it to user ID 0 (root).

Package

Stable releases of Lynis are packaged and made available as RPM or DEB package. The CISOfy software repository can be used to install Lynis on systems running : CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OEL, openSUSE, RHEL, Ubuntu, and others.