Strengthen your system’s security

ClamAV is the free and open source multithreaded virus scanner developed by Cisco systems after its acquisition from Sourcefire in 2013. It might help to have this installed on the new ISO as well, just in case the reason why you were attempting data recovery in the first place was because of a virus. However unlikely it is that the system is compromised with a virus, having ClamAV pre-installed might be handy along with some other software.

Another useful software to have would be AIDE. Note that it only carries out file integrity checks. It can’t check for signs of rootkits or take a look inside the logfiles for anything suspicious. For that you’d want to take a look at something like logwatch. For rootkits we recommend chkrootkit, as do many others. Chkrootkit is a tool that checks locally for signs of a rootkit, and to its credit it was listed in the 2006 Top 100 Network security tools.

For advice on making the system secure, consider employing a tool called lynis, which has been developed by CISOfy that specialises in Linux and UNIX. There’s an enterprise version (which you have to pay for), but the free version does a good job of telling you how secure your system is, on a rating of 0 to 100, and parses the results for you so you can learn what steps you can take to secure the system. Free, authoritative advice – what’s not to like?