Book Image

Mastering Windows Security and Hardening - Second Edition

By : Mark Dunkerley, Matt Tumbarello
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Windows Security and Hardening - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Mark Dunkerley, Matt Tumbarello

Overview of this book

Are you looking for the most current and effective ways to protect Windows-based systems from being compromised by intruders? This updated second edition is a detailed guide that helps you gain the expertise to implement efficient security measures and create robust defense solutions using modern technologies. The first part of the book covers security fundamentals with details around building and implementing baseline controls. As you advance, you’ll learn how to effectively secure and harden your Windows-based systems through hardware, virtualization, networking, and identity and access management (IAM). The second section will cover administering security controls for Windows clients and servers with remote policy management using Intune, Configuration Manager, Group Policy, Defender for Endpoint, and other Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud security technologies. In the last section, you’ll discover how to protect, detect, and respond with security monitoring, reporting, operations, testing, and auditing. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed an understanding of the processes and tools involved in enforcing security controls and implementing zero-trust security principles to protect Windows systems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started and Fundamentals
7
Part 2: Applying Security and Hardening
15
Part 3: Protecting, Detecting, and Responding for Windows Environments

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how standard computer communications protocols are used as attack vectors in MiTM attacks. We learned how to configure policies to mitigate them and that in a well-administered network, protocols such as LLMNR, NBT-NS, mDNS, and WPAD can be disabled. Next, we talked about relay attacks and covered different security settings that can be used to protect against exploits that target Kerberos authentication, SMB, LDAP, IPv6, and ARP. After that, we covered how an attacker can use discovery tactics to move laterally and escalate privileges. We reviewed different attack techniques, such as golden and silver tickets, that can be used to exploit Kerberos authentication, and covered areas targeted to steal credentials on an OS.

Finally, we reviewed the privacy settings that are listed in the Privacy & Security section of the Windows Settings app. We discussed how to control these settings using Intune and listed where to find the relevant policies...