Security is a big, challenging topic, but everyone with server-side responsibilities should know the basic steps. Cameron outlines a number of ways to keep your user accounts clean and safe.

Security is hard. It doesn't sit still, and it's difficult to know how far it needs to extend: if you don't watch yourself, you can end up believing that your boss needs to understand the beauty of elliptic curves when all he really wants is to make sure the custodian doesn't read his annual budget.

However challenging it is to keep up with all facets of computing security, a few areas have matured enough to be worth learning methodically. The first one I recommend to anyone working with Linux servers is account management.

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