CIS-Harden your Ubuntu in Google Cloud

CIS Benchmarks are best practices for the secure configuration of a target system. The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS^®) is the authority backing CIS Benchmarks. Ubuntu Pro is entitled to be CIS compliant and packaged with CIS toolings from Canonical.

Let’s SSH into your Ubuntu Pro virtual machine. If you haven’t yet upgrade your Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu Pro, please follow this tutorial. In less than One Minute, you will be able to get your Ubuntu Pro machine without losing any of your mission critical workloads. Once you SSH into your Ubuntu Pro, input:

You will see:

Let’s enable CIS for this VM:

You will see:

If you check the status:

You will see:

With tooling packages installed, let’s harden your Ubuntu 16.04 Pro system with CIS Level 1 Server profile:

In less than 3 minutes, your Ubuntu Pro will go through the whole process of hardening and you will get a CIS level-1 compliant environment with no more manual configuration. Let’s audit the system:

The output should be similar to:

The HTML report as shown above will also present your CIS score. For comprehensive CIS hardening instructions, you can check Ubuntu CIS Compliance documentation.