In the last three years (by the eyes of this blogger) Ubuntu has showed more and more to the world that for sure Security matters! This post will list you the amazing things Security team at Ubuntu has made happens to make the life of normal users and pay customers better.
The first one is all about be aware, about get trend info, and if you are too busy to keep reading notes and blogs, you will love to know Ubuntu Security Team has a podcast fulled of info about what is trend, what the team is doing what were the last dragons they found at the bugs caves and so on. The podcast is made by these two amazing guys at our team: Alex Murray (the Security Tech Leader) and Joe McManus (Engineering Director at Security). Go for it and take a listen and get the knowledge at Ubuntu Security Podcast.
Second one is about be aware of your system and security bugs/patch needed. Ubuntu has a brand new tool called cvescan:
CVEScan analyzes an Ubuntu system to check whether all available security patches have been installed. CVEScan produces a clear, concise report that tells you which, if any, security patches an Ubuntu system may be missing.
I could talk more about it, but go there play with it and it will talk for itself. More info about and steps to install here .
The third one is about updates. There is nothing worst than see a vulnerability be dropped over the internet and see that your system is vulnerable mainly if you run critical software/products in your work, for fun or so on. Ubuntu does hundreds of security updates in months and you can follow the notices about them at the Ubuntu Security Notes website. But if you are looking for standards ways to be aware of it you can go nuts and check another brand new thing Ubuntu has made available the Ubuntu Oval. If you are not familiar of OVAL, here a short description of it:
Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language is an international, information security, community standard to promote open and publicly available security content, and to standardize the transfer of this information across the entire spectrum of security tools and services.
Basically using the OVAL you can achieve things like see if you system needs an update/patch, quite same as it is in CVEScan, the difference here is that OVAL is made for machines consuming and spit some beauty/info html report, while CVEScan already presents you with a beautiful report at your terminal screen and was made for humans to consuming.
Last but not least Extend Security Maintenance (ESM). How about continue to receive security updates after your LTS release goes EOL? That is the exactly idea behind Ubuntu ESM. Just imagine you are using Xenial and can’t move to a new brand release right now, but you can’t let your system insecure, so that was made for you! If you sign for this you will keep receiving a set of updates for a give list of packages without concern about security breaches.
As you can see there are bunch happening in terms of Security in Ubuntu, this list is just a small subset of the great adventure Ubuntu is doing at security lands, and so far it sounds great. Sounds Ubuntu Security is in very good hands and that is why you should choice Ubuntu, for sure!
If you are willing to know more about what is going on there take a look at https://ubuntu.com/security.
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