As we had begun to explore in the previous section, each CIS Benchmark has a level and scoring associated with it. The level is of particular concern to us as, while we wish to secure our systems as effectively as possible, we would not wish to break any running systems. For this reason, it is highly advisable to apply the benchmarks in an isolated test environment and test your applications before deploying them to a production environment. Indeed, if the application of a benchmark breaks a given system, the following process should be executed in the enterprise to resolve it:
- Establish which benchmark caused the issue.
- Determine which internal systems were affected by the benchmark.
- Decide whether the internal systems can be changed to work with the benchmarks (for example, use an unprivileged account over SSH rather than root).
- Implement the...