Why harden os

Ultimately, by devoting a little bit of time to harden your Operating System, you can save yourself a great deal of time in the long run by diminishing the risk of a successful cyberattack. Please note that an OS hardening strategy also needs to be complemented by a data backup, which is the final line of defense. This way, if something goes awry, you can restore your PC and all of your data.

Please also see the Working Remotely — Cybersecurity Tips blog to review more valuable tips. But in certain situations, you may want to avoid auto-updates and instead require administrators to approve software changes manually in order to minimize the risk of an update that could disrupt a critical service.

OS hardening frameworks. Some operating systems provide frameworks that are designed for the specific purpose of adding extra access control and anti-buffer-overflow features to the system and the applications it hosts.

In general, installing or enabling these tools is a good practice that should be included in your system hardening checklist. Data and workload isolation. For OS hardening, it is a good idea to isolate data and workloads from one another as much as possible. Isolation can be achieved by hosting different databases or applications inside different virtual machines or containers, or restricting network access between different workloads.

That way, if an attacker is able to gain control of one workload, he won't necessarily be able to access others as well. Disable unnecessary features.

It is also a best practice to disable any operating system or application features that you are not using. For example, if your Linux server runs a graphical interface by default but you will only be accessing the system through an SSH client, you should disable or, better, uninstall completely the graphical interface.

Similarly, if your Windows workstation has Skype installed by default but the users will actually be running Skype, disable or uninstall the program. In addition to consuming system resources unnecessarily, features that are not being used create potential security holes.

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The reason why is made clear in the U. Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy Report :. Competitors deterred from engaging the United States and our allies in an armed conflict are using cyberspace operations to steal our technology, disrupt our government and commerce, challenge our democratic processes, and threaten our critical infrastructure.

As such, many companies supporting and selling servers and workstations to the DoD are turning to advanced system hardening tools and best practices to improve the security of their servers and other computer systems, oftentimes as a prerequisite for doing business with the DoD. In this blog post, we'll discuss system hardening, its importance, the types of system hardening, how system hardening is achieved, and more.

By the end, you should know what steps to take to begin or expand upon your system hardening processes and procedures. Graphic: System hardening involves reducing a server's or workstation's attack surface. System hardening is the process of securing a server or computer system by minimizing its attack surface, or surface of vulnerability, and potential attack vectors.

Part of the system hardening elimination process involves deleting or disabling needless system applications, permissions, ports, user accounts, and other features so that attackers have fewer opportunities to gain access to a mission-critical or critical-infrastructure computer system's sensitive information. But at its core, system hardening is a method for protecting a system against attacks perpetrated by cybercriminals.

Now you know why system hardening exists, but you might be wondering about its practical purpose and why businesses and organizations implement system hardening practices. The basic purpose of implementing system hardening techniques and practices is to simply minimize the number of potential entryways an attacker could use to access your system and to do so from inception. This is oftentimes referred to as following a secure-by-design philosophy.

Graphic: There are a few different types of system hardening, but they're all interrelated. Endpoint protection—Windows comes with an advanced endpoint protection solution called Windows Defender.

Beyond this solution, there is a selection of mature endpoint protection platforms EPP that provide several layers of protection for operating systems — including malware protection, email and social engineering protection, detection of malicious processes, and automated isolation of an OS in case of infection. Data and workload isolation—ensure that sensitive databases or applications run in their own virtual machines or containers, to isolate them from other workloads and reduce the attack surface.

Alternatively, you can isolate applications by restricting network access between different workloads. In this way, if attackers take control of one workload, they cannot get access to another. OS hardening can help you reduce the risk of a successful cyber attack. However, to be truly effective, your OS hardening strategy should be implemented alongside a data backup process. This ensures that you have copies of your data and operational systems, and can use them to restore operations if failure occurs.

The center develops security benchmarks and best practices with broad applicability, using a consensus model. A CIS benchmark serves as a configuration baseline and also as a best practices for securely configurating systems.