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

Summary

In this chapter, we provided an overview of the hardware-based security features used to protect Windows from the boot chain, the OS layer, and for virtualization of the OS. We covered hardware concerns in terms of vulnerabilities such as rootkits and bootkits and the importance of the supply chain to ensure your organization purchases hardware that has been properly certified. Next, we covered BIOS, Secure Boot, and TPM and how these hardware components are the framework for hardware backed VBS. We talked about the latest advanced protection features using VBS such as Credential Guard, Device Guard, Windows Defender Application Control, and Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, as well as how to enable them using MDM or through Group Policy.

Finally, we finished by discussing how System Guard uses dynamic root of trust measurements and remote attestation to help protect your systems from the boot process into runtime.

In the next chapter, we will discuss networking and...