Networking / Beginners

The Caution ListChanges You Should Not Make

There are certain tweaks that you should not make. Nevertheless, you see them recommended in various sources. It is worth mentioning these and why you should not make them.

Account Lockout

We do not go into depth about it here. However, account lockout will almost certainly increase your help desk cost significantly. In addition, it also only protects bad passwords. You would be better off getting rid of guessable passwords.

Full Privilege Auditing

FullPrivilegeAuditing, or "Audit: Audit the use of Backup and Restore privilege" in Group Policy, configures the system to audit all file access even when they are performed by a backup program. This setting is one of several "blow up my event logs" settings that will simply fill your event logs with a large amount of mostly useless information that you probably do not care about anyway.

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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