Detect System Activity Using Python

Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

This challenge will teach learners how they can create a Python script that will extract a list of active users for a Linux system, compare that to all registered users, and generate an alert if there are any unauthorized user accounts on the system.

In this challenge, we will focus on how to monitor system resources, in particular storage and memory usage on a system. This is important from an availability point of view, for critical applications like a web server you want to ensure that these systems are not overloaded.

In this challenge, we will look at extracting a list of all open ports and the services running on those ports for our Ubuntu system. This is important because open ports represent the attack surface of your machine to the outside world.

This challenge will focus on Cron Jobs and how we can use them to automatically run our scripts on a given interval. We will create a cron job that runs our scripts without the need for human intervention. You will also use the tool auditd to monitor the central log file for any changes (which would indicate potential malicious activity) and record who is doing the edits, this would ensure that no one is maliciously modifying the file in a real-world scenario.

Welcome to the final challenge! This is your last chance to experiment in the environment. Clicking Finish Lab will end this little world that flittered into existence just for you.