Book Image

Mastering Windows Security and Hardening

By : Mark Dunkerley, Matt Tumbarello
Book Image

Mastering Windows Security and Hardening

By: Mark Dunkerley, Matt Tumbarello

Overview of this book

Are you looking for effective ways to protect Windows-based systems from being compromised by unauthorized users? Mastering Windows Security and Hardening is a detailed guide that helps you gain expertise when implementing efficient security measures and creating robust defense solutions. We will begin with an introduction to Windows security fundamentals, baselining, and the importance of building a baseline for an organization. As you advance, you will learn how to effectively secure and harden your Windows-based system, protect identities, and even manage access. In the concluding chapters, the book will take you through testing, monitoring, and security operations. In addition to this, you’ll be equipped with the tools you need to ensure compliance and continuous monitoring through security operations. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a full understanding of the processes and tools involved in securing and hardening your Windows environment.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started
6
Section 2: Applying Security and Hardening
13
Section 3: Protecting, Detecting, and Responding for Windows Environments

Building security baselines

Security baselining is the practice of implementing a minimum set of standards and configurations within your environment. More specifically, it involves capturing a minimum configuration for your Windows devices. Building a baseline provides a minimum defined standard that will help ensure a more secure environment as you deploy systems and devices within an organization. We covered building standards for security baselines in Chapter 2, Building a Baseline. However, here, we want to focus specifically on Windows using the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit to create, apply, and analyze your Windows baselines.

Using the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit

We will be using the recommended baselines from the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit to build our policies. When downloading the toolkit, the following options are available for selection from the Microsoft download site:

  • Windows 10 security baselines
  • Windows Server security...