How to make Ubuntu even more safe?

Ever considered to make your Ubuntu installation even more secure? There is an excellent chapter available in the official Ubuntu documentation called "Keeping Your Computer Safe" that is worth to read. I used its sub chapter "Set up a firewall" to install the firestarter package - an Open Source visual firewall program that combines ease of use with powerful firewall features. To understand its basic features and how to use them you can read the quick tutorial from the Firestarter Online Manual. After completing the start wizard, some services that you might have on your machine such as a web server or a SSH server will not be reachable any longer from the outside because the default configuration set up provides strong protection against incoming intrusions. E.g. the connection from my Macbook via SSH to my Ubuntu machine wasn't possible any longer and therefore my rsync script described in my previous post "Synchronize files between a Macbook and an Ubuntu machine using rsync via ssh" stopped with timeout. Fortunately, Firestarter made it very easy to allow the connection again. The Firestarter User Interface listed the connection attempt. In order to authorize this connection, I simply had to right-click the entry and select "Allow inbound service for source" to allow SSH access from my Macbook (and no other computer) via SSH to my Ubuntu machine. After that, the synchronization script worked again.

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