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

Creating performance baselines

Apart from the normal operational monitoring of your servers, it's important to build and document performance baselines of your server workloads. A performance baseline can be as simple as a set of metrics for the processor percentage, overall processer usage, memory, disk space, and network throughput observed and documented over a time period during peak and off peak business hours. Performance baselines should be captured on a recurring schedule and the frequency dictated by the business criticality and/or workload type. Once established, you can compare real-time performance metrics against the captured baseline for comparison. Not only is this useful for diagnosing issues and for cost tracking and optimization, but the ability to observe any odd performance metrics also helps with identifying potential security attacks. The benefits of performance baselining include the following:

  • Risk mitigation
  • Capacity planning
  • Improvement...