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

Policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines

A follow-on to the previous section is policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines. This section works hand-in-hand with baselining and holds extreme importance within an organization. It is critical that as part of your security program well-defined policies, standards, and procedures are in place and are followed by everyone. In addition, it is important that policies are signed off on and enforced by leadership. Without this support, it becomes more difficult to enforce and collectively get behind security from an organizational level.

Start by defining and creating your company policies. As a result, your standards can then be built to form the foundation of your baselines. Once these baselines are created, procedures and guidelines can be built to implement the baselines and help accomplish the end goal. Keeping this strategy in mind will drive compliance with your company policies.

The following section provides a brief...