Networking / Beginners

Myth 4: Tweaks Are Necessary

Some people consider tweaks a necessity, claiming that you cannot have a secure (read "protected") system without making a bunch of tweaks. This is an oversimplification. Tweaks block things you cannot block elsewhere. For instance, if you have two systems on a home network behind a firewall, or a corporate system that has IPsec policies that only allow it to request and receive information from a few well-managed servers, tweaks are mostly not necessary to improve security. Those systems will be perfectly fine without making any tweaks.

Even on highly exposed systems, most of the tweaks are not necessary. In eWeek's Open Hack IV competition in 2002 (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/openhack.asp), we built what was probably the most protected network we have ever built. In all, we made only four Registry tweaks, a couple of ACL changes, and set a password policy. The rest of the protection for those systems was based on proper network segmentation a solid understanding of the threats, turning off unneeded services, hardening Web apps and properly protecting the SQL and Web servers. Of course, this was a specialized system with very limited functionality, but it still shows that less is often more.

Proper understanding of the threats and realistic mitigation of those threats through a solid network architecture is much more important than most of the security tweaks we turn on in the name of security.

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In this tutorial:

  1. Protecting Hosts
  2. Security Configuration Myths
  3. Myth 1: Security Guides Make Your System Secure
  4. Myth 2: If We Hide It, they Not Find It
  5. Myth 3: The More Tweaks, the Better
  6. Myth 4: Tweaks Are Necessary
  7. Myth 5: All Environments Should At Least Use <Insert Favorite Guide Here>
  8. Myth 6: "High Security" Is an End Goal for All Environments
  9. Myth 7: Start Securing Your Environment by Applying a Security Guide
  10. Myth 8: Security Tweaks Can Fix Physical Security Problems
  11. Myth 9: Security Tweaks Will Stop Worms/Viruses
  12. Myth 10: An Expert Recommended This Tweak as Defense in Depth
  13. Server Security Tweaks
  14. Software Restriction Policies
  15. Do Not Store LAN Manager Hash Value
  16. Anonymous Restrictions
  17. Security Identifiers (SIDs)
  18. Password Policies
  19. SMB Message Signing
  20. Networking LAN Manager Authentication Level
  21. TCP Hardening
  22. Restricted Groups
  23. Audit Settings
  24. Client Security Tweaks
  25. Firewalls
  26. IPsec Filters
  27. SafeDllSearchMode
  28. Local Administrator Account Control
  29. Limit Local Account Use of Blank Passwords to Console Logon Only
  30. Logon Events
  31. Allowed to Format and Eject Removable Media
  32. The Caution ListChanges You Should Not Make
  33. Crash on Audit Failure
  34. Clear Virtual Memory Page File
  35. Security Configuration Tools