Monday, September 04, 2006

Empty iptables in Ubuntu default installation

Now that my site is famous (almost), I'm beginning to think about security. Actually I should have thought about it even before opening the site to the public. So here I am, sitting in front of my black box, thinking about security.

Googling around for some time revealed more details about a word I happened to know previously - "iptables". A quick check at my iptables configuration in default ubuntu installation revealed that I do not have any firewall rules set at all! Now, this makes me think twice about my server security. How then, no one was able to hack the site?

The answer is my router. It has an in-built firewall, which I had configured to allow only ports 80 (HTTP) and 22 (SSH). I would just have port 80 open, but I needed remote management. So I opened port 22 as well.

I'll find more details about server security, and post them here.

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