A+ Certification / Beginners

Implementing Security Best Practices

In the following sections, you discover some basic best practices that can help you secure your environment.

Hardening a system

The first thing you can do to secure your system is to harden it. Hardening a system means that you remove any software that you are not using and you disable any Windows services that are not needed. The concept of hardening comes from the fact that hackers compromise systems by leveraging software that is installed or running on the system. The less software you have running, the less likely you are to be hacked!

Patching systems

Regularly patching the system by running Windows Update is critical. As Microsoft finds out about security problems with its operating system and software, its programmers fix the problem and deliver the fix through the Windows Update site. To ensure that you are getting the security fixes and patches, you must run Windows Update often.

Microsoft has changed from Windows Update to Microsoft Update so that you can now get updates for more than just the Windows operating system. You can download updates for a number of Microsoft products from the Microsoft Update site, such as Windows and Microsoft Office.

Firewalls

Make sure you turn on the firewall feature in Windows. The firewall helps protect your system from network attacks, but it is not the be-all and end-all of network security. You also need to follow the other best practices presented in this tutorial.

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In this tutorial:

  1. Implementing Security
  2. Securing Systems through BIOS
  3. Implementing Users and Groups
  4. Creating groups
  5. Implementing Permissions and Rights
  6. Permissions
  7. Implementing Auditing
  8. Reviewing the Security Log
  9. How a firewall works
  10. Implementing Security Best Practices
  11. Password policies
  12. Use anti-virus software