Patching the System (cont.)

Delete extraneous users (like uucp) from /etc/passwd. Inactive users should have a * in field 2 of /etc/passwd and the shell set to /bin/false.

Install GNU Privacy Guard (gpg), since many of the security packages are signed. Make sure you get the detached sig file and keys.

Set up Secure Shell. My recommendation is to use OpenSSH from the OpenBSD project. Under Debian, apt-get install ssh will install OpenSSH.

This will give you secure access to the rest of the network. (Note that Debian includes these packages in the base distribution.)