OS hardening and security best practices in Operating Systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

OS Hardening and Security Best Practices

📖 Scenario: You are a system administrator responsible for securing a company's servers. To protect the servers from unauthorized access and attacks, you need to apply basic OS hardening and security best practices.

🎯 Goal: Build a checklist of OS hardening steps and security best practices that can be applied to a server to improve its security.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of common OS hardening steps with exact items

Add a configuration variable to set a security level

Use a loop to filter and collect only the best practices relevant to the chosen security level

Complete the checklist by adding a final summary statement

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

System administrators use OS hardening steps to protect servers from attacks and unauthorized access.

💼 Career

Understanding and applying OS security best practices is essential for roles in IT support, cybersecurity, and system administration.

1

Create the OS Hardening Steps List

Create a list called hardening_steps with these exact items: 'Disable unused services', 'Apply security patches', 'Configure firewall', 'Set strong passwords', 'Enable automatic updates'.

Operating Systems

# Create the list hardening_steps with the specified items
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and include all items as strings separated by commas.

2

Set the Security Level Configuration

Create a variable called security_level and set it to the string 'medium'.

Operating Systems

hardening_steps = ['Disable unused services', 'Apply security patches', 'Configure firewall', 'Set strong passwords', 'Enable automatic updates']
# Set the security_level variable to 'medium'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'medium' to the variable security_level.

3

Filter Hardening Steps by Security Level

Create a new list called selected_steps that includes only these items from hardening_steps when security_level is 'medium': 'Apply security patches', 'Configure firewall', and 'Set strong passwords'. Use a for loop with the variable step to iterate over hardening_steps and add the matching items to selected_steps.

Operating Systems

hardening_steps = ['Disable unused services', 'Apply security patches', 'Configure firewall', 'Set strong passwords', 'Enable automatic updates']
security_level = 'medium'
selected_steps = []
# Use a for loop with variable step to add the specified items to selected_steps
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to check each step and append only the allowed steps to selected_steps.

4

Add Final Summary Statement

Create a variable called summary and set it to the string 'Security checklist ready for medium level'.

Operating Systems

hardening_steps = ['Disable unused services', 'Apply security patches', 'Configure firewall', 'Set strong passwords', 'Enable automatic updates']
security_level = 'medium'
selected_steps = []
for step in hardening_steps:
    if step in ['Apply security patches', 'Configure firewall', 'Set strong passwords']:
        selected_steps.append(step)
# Create the summary variable with the specified string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact string to the variable summary.