Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By : Cesar Bravo
Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By: Cesar Bravo

Overview of this book

Every organization has its own data and digital assets that need to be protected against an ever-growing threat landscape that compromises the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of crucial data. Therefore, it is important to train professionals in the latest defensive security skills and tools to secure them. Mastering Defensive Security provides you with in-depth knowledge of the latest cybersecurity threats along with the best tools and techniques needed to keep your infrastructure secure. The book begins by establishing a strong foundation of cybersecurity concepts and advances to explore the latest security technologies such as Wireshark, Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA), Burp Suite, OpenVAS, and Nmap, hardware threats such as a weaponized Raspberry Pi, and hardening techniques for Unix, Windows, web applications, and cloud infrastructures. As you make progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with several advanced techniques such as malware analysis, security automation, computer forensics, and vulnerability assessment, which will help you to leverage pentesting for security. By the end of this book, you'll have become familiar with creating your own defensive security tools using IoT devices and developed advanced defensive security skills.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Mastering Defensive Security Concepts
7
Section 2: Applying Defensive Security
15
Section 3: Deep Dive into Defensive Security

Applying security to AD

While there is not an official guideline or standard for securing AD, here is a compilation of the industry best practices that you can leverage to enhance the security of your AD servers:

  • Never install additional software, roles, or services on domain controllers.
  • Never create local users on domain controllers (user management must be carefully handled on domain controllers).
  • Make sure accounts are created based on PoLP.
  • Maintain a record (list) of AD privilege accounts that includes owners, rights, and other relevant data about the account (to prevent ghost accounts).

    Tip

    Ghost account is a term used for accounts in which the ownership or usage is unclear. While this may not be an issue on small infrastructures, it can become a huge problem in big environments in which best practices are not followed and you may have dozens of those accounts, which represents a significant risk to your infrastructure.

  • AD privilege accounts should not...