Lynis For Linux

Lynis is an open source command-line auditing tool for Linux/UNIX specialists. It is designed to scan the system configuration and create an overview of the system information and security issues, which can later by used by professional auditors.

The developers behind the Lynis project warn users that the software won’t become an all round solution for creating a "safe system," as it should only assist users in automated audits. The Intended audience for Lynis is security specialists, system auditors, as well system and network managers.

The software comprises of a central management tool, an implementation and reporting plan, as well as Lynis plugins that will extend the software’s default capabilities, providing support for malware detection, digital forensics, heuristics and system statistics.

Lynis is a complete solution, useful for configuration management, technical auditing, system hardening, security incident detection and system monitoring. It can be successfully used on enterprise environments, as well as on small and medium-sized businesses. The application supports standards like Basel II, SOx (Sarbanes-Oxley), GLBA, ISO27001, ISO27002, HIPAA and PCI-DSS.

As mentioned, Lynis is a cross-platform application. It has been successfully tested on various GNU/Linux distributions, including CentOS, Arch Linux, BackTrack, ClearOS, Fedora, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kali, Linux Mint, Knoppix, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Scientific Linux, Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu and Debian, several BSD flavors, such as DragonFly BSD, PC-BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, as well as on the Mac OS X, AIX, OpenSolaris and HP-UX operating system. Both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures are supported at this time.

Lynis can be downloaded from Softpedia or directly from the project’s official website as a universal source archive for all the aforementioned operating systems. It is written entirely in UNIX Shell scripting language and has no dependencies.