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

Mastering endpoint security

Most of the best practices that we reviewed for servers are also applicable to workstations, so instead of repeating them, let's review some additional security mechanisms and tools that are specifically applicable to workstations.

Windows updates

We already talked about the importance of patching the OS; however, I want to highlight that you can leverage WSUS to distribute updates to your workstations. Here is a great step-by-step guide created by Microsoft that shows you how to configure it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/waas-manage-updates-wsus.

Why move to Windows 10?

As mentioned, there are many reasons to keep your systems running the latest versions of the OS, but here, we are going to highlight some additional aspects to consider about why it would be a good idea to migrate to Windows 10.

Windows as a service

In the past, Microsoft released new versions of Windows every few years, which represented...