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

Introduction to baselining

Security baselining is the practice of implementing a minimum set of standards and configuration within your environment; more specifically, capturing a minimum configuration for your Windows devices. Building a baseline provides a minimum defined standard, which will help ensure a more secure environment as you deploy systems and devices within your enterprise. Depending on the size of your organization, baselines could vary from checklists or spreadsheets that someone follows to ensure the predefined security controls are in place to a captured snapshot or image that is already preconfigured with the predefined security controls. In addition to the starting baseline, there are additional management tools to layer and enforce baseline configurations. A couple of examples include Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Mobile Device Management (MDM).

Unless you are a small business with under 100 employees, it would be impractical to deploy any type of system...