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Enterprise editions of Windows 10 include Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection , a security platform that monitors endpoints such as Windows 10 PCs using behavioral sensors. You should install urgent security updates right away. Some Carbide patches are critical fixes for protecting you from a new type of malware or cyberattack. Your company may have a security policy about updating your operating system too.

Depending on your company, your IT team may be responsible for updating your operating system. Even if you heard about a design change that you might not like. Microsoft does keep it relatively simple by setting up two different types of updates: quality updates, feature updates.

If your business is running on an older version of Windows? Make sure you upgrade your operating systems before they become a security nightmare. Support for Windows 7 ends in January , which means anyone still using it or an older OS!

Routine file backups are essential for protecting yourself from losing important data if you have a sudden hard-drive failure or your PC get a virus. Windows 10 comes with tools and features that make backing up your data easy. For large companies, or even startups and small businesses, file backups are critical for recovering from a cyberattack incident or disaster.

After the devastating cyberattack known as NotPetya , system backups were crucial for recovery when malware crippled the IT systems of multiple global companies and government agencies.

Encryption encodes your data so only authorized users with your password can view, copy, or make changes. If your encrypted information were stolen, it would be unusable. Encrypting your entire drive also protects against unauthorized changes to your system, like firmware-level malware.

The Administrators group is present so that any admin can access your files in an emergency. This can be removed to ensure that the Install Admin can't get at your files. Removing the ACL entry will ensure that your data stays private. If the account will never be removed, or if you can remember to re-instate the Administrators group, then this rule can be deleted. The files you save in Documents, Pictures and Videos are private.

In event of a hacker attack, she will explore those folders in depth. Again, don't put those files in an account you surf with. And encrypt your data. Use the downloaded VeraCrypt. Look through your documents folder now. Decide which files need to be segregated into the separate encrypted volume or to an offline machine.

You MUST categorize your data files. What you don't know is what you don't know. And without looking through your documents, you will be storing important files along side your trivial document files. Passwords list for your web sites need to physically written down into a notebook, not stored in a Notepad text file.

Hackers know to look for such files. File History saves your documents, pictures, music, contacts and IE favorites every hour to a removable drive or USB key. It does it every hour by default and keeps versions of the files as they change. This is a very convenient method of performing backups and should be used. Just remember to unplug the USB key when you shut down the computer and carry it with you, or else your attackers will gain access to all your files.

There is a new version of Edge based on the open source Chromium browser. It looks a lot like Chrome. Plus, it still contains Edge features like SmartScreen and Application Guard Application Guard is a hardware based protection and is only available to Windows Pro users. Windows 10 20H2 have it installed by default, or you can google for Chromium Edge and you will find the download. MS decided that it is too much work for programmers to maintain different web code for all the different browsers and decided to adopt the Chromium browser.

Plus, Edge now has access to all the extensions made for Chrome. Copy and paste the following into a filo named user. Rename amy existing user. Then rename USER. The file contains all the above settings and it will append or override the default settings. NOTE: for Firefox You have to open prefs. In Firefox If you are under attack, set both to false.

The settings above includes these 2 settings, and I keep a tab open to about:config to toggle them as when required. In general, the less unecessary connections you make the better. Automatic connections that always happen can be used against you. An attacker can spoof that auto connect address and launch an attack if Firefox is vulnerable in it's receptors. The author has experienced denial of service attacks where a crafted packet was sent to some telemetry component and it always closes Firefox.

The telemetry features are turned off for you above. You should set the following settings manually:. Opera, starting with version Unfortunately, the Chrome settings cannot be copied from one PC to another, so the above will have be done manually. The version above seems to have preferences for Chrome Flags and will not import a Local Settings file from from another PC. So all the processing of javascript and other things takes place in the server. However, it doesn't support extensions and plugins.

And it doesn't even support the 'back' button of my mouse. And it doesn't support the Yubikey. However, when current versions of Chrome, Firefox and Edge has bugs, and you need a browser to use, this is a good one. As of this sections writing The latest version of Sandboxie 5. YubiKey is a hardware security token. However, cell phones can be easily hacked, especially Androids and that 2nd factor would be useless.

The token is a small USB insert and can also be used with your cell phone if your cell phone has NFC near field communications. So you either insert the USB end into your PC or tap the token on your cell phone when navigating to gmail. You have to buy 2 tokens to register with Google Advanced Protection Program.

One for daily use, and another for backup in case you lose the first one. And it is currently the best 2nd Factor authentication security measure. Highly recommended. Notice that Sandboxie only protects attackers from writing to disk, thus gaining persistence. Sandboxie does not protect an attacker who uses RAM only attacks exploits. HitmanPro Alert detects many exploit coding techniques and is a good defense for your browser. It contains all the features of HitmanPro which is a good 2nd opinion AV and adds anti-exploit capability.

Note that if you run it witout purchasing after the 30 day trial period, there are no anti-exploit capabilities. Hitmanpro Alert displays a big dialog box when it detects an exploit and tries to close your browser.

However, when used it conjunction with Sandboxie, it cannot close the browser - you have to manually close it upon seeing the notice. But the good thing is you know when you are hit, without it, you will be blissfully unaware that an exploit has been thrown at you. And then you can check the Sandboxie icon in the systray to see if there are still any red dots in the icon - that means that there are still processes left running in the sandbox.

VPN services proclaim because they encrypt your internet browsing traffic, you are secured. But the thing is, what are you protected from? It does not protect you from everything else far more dangerous: hackers, malware, drive-by-downloads, javascript attacks, and everything else the internet can bring.

From onwards, most web sites are almost obliged to provide https aka SSL encryption by popular demand - you see the padlock symbol to the right of the address bar of your browser. So your traffic to web sites are already encrypted without a VPN service. And the Firefox and Chrome browsers will stop transmissions whenever your traffic is being spied upon or manipulated by a man-in-the-middle attack and bring up a big warning notification.

VPN services were useful when offering https was expensive and only done by financial institutions and web stores. Now, everybody is using https, even web sites that only serve news; don't sell anything and don't have financial anything.

VPN services are expensive, and your money is better left in your wallet or purse. The best way to manage passwords is to use an address book. Yes, that's pen and paper.

Keeping it in a file on the computer is just waiting for disaster to happen. Hackers know how lazy people get and rely on copy and paste from a password file, and they use a utility program to quickly search for a password file. Use an address book. Many security experts recommend a password manager browser extension to keep track of online passwords. You just have to remember the master password, and the correct password will be inserted for you when you reach a login page. Some, like Lastpass can also generate a secure gibberish password for you.

And some password managers support 2nd factor authentication like with Google's Authenticator cell phone app; so that you need to remember a master password and Google Authenticator will generate a 6 digit code for you to enter into LastPass, only then will it allow access to your password list. Don't use the 'remember your password' feature of the browser, that password list is not securely stored And don't forget the master password, Lastpass does not know your master password because they don't keep it; once you forget it all your passwords are lost.

But then if you use your browser every day and hence the master password, there's is little chance of you forgetting it. If an attacker can insert a Linux Live CD and start up your PC, then they will be able to mount your hard drive and read all data from it, and all Windows security will be bypassed. Physical security is very important and should not be overlooked.

If someone has physical access to your PC, then they could bypass a lot of the hardening that was done. For example, if a attacker could access your PC and boot up a Linux Live CD, he could then read and copy off all files from the Windows disk partition.

Or he could remove your hard drive and put it into another PC as a secondary drive and get data off that way. Either way, Window's password security will be of no use, because the hard drive's copy of Windows was never started. Lock your office or study room or bedroom containing your PC. And if it is on the ground floor of a house, then lock the Windows too. A door lock serves to buy time for discovery of intrusion.

It cannot be counted upon to prevent an intrusion as all police departments know, because if a lock is too difficult to pick, they can always drill it or break down the door. But then you would know after the fact and then the stealth preferred by hackers will be gone.

BitLocker is a full disk encryption feature of Windows 10 Pro, When that is active, the whole drive is encrypted and will not be readable with other copies of Windows or Linux. This eliminates the offline attacks as mentioned above. Simply choose 'Import Custom View' to import each xml file one by one. There are 54 custom views in the Configuration Pack. Now that Windows is hardened, most of the vulnerabilities you face will come from applications.

The concepts that underlie protecting apps are the same as protecting the OS. Be careful of apps that have high privileges, and scrutinise network facing apps. Patching is really important and upgrade the app when new versions are posted. Be aware of what is normal and what is not. Know the protection settings that have been applied and know when a change is made by an attacker.

For example, your full-admin's Documents folder has been set to only have 1 ACL which is full accesss by the full-admin; if you find that suddenly that another ACL has been added giving access to, for example, the administrators group then something is wrong. You click on Start and type 'Reliability History' and it will display a overview of what critical events has happened in the last month or so. You want to pay attention to the red X's which mark critical events.

In the bottom pane, after you click on a date column on top, it will show all the notable events for that day. It does not replace going through Event Viewer's list of custom views, it is a summary.

The benefits are:. Logalyze install consists of 4 downloads: Evtsys. It is needed by Logalyze to present the logs in a web page. It doesn't have an installer. Just unzip and copy to Program Files. Logalyze doesn't have an installer. Then Disable all other Inbound rules.

This operations center machine is important and must be hardened. These are security compromises we need to take: executables needs to be run from the user-writable AppData folders, and cmd.

Go into Advanced and Disable Inheritance. Then install EvtSys on each Windows machine. EvtSys translates and sends Windows event logs to the syslog server, which is the common name for event log collector.

Note the Ethernet adapter needs to be connected for the service to start, just unplug the Router to stop it from going online while we are hardening. To start Logalyze you run 2 bat files and open your browser. Then start your browser, and use the address To see the logs that Logalyze collected, go to the Search tab, set the time frame drop down, and click on the magnifying glass icon to the right of the search bar.

To search for several Event ID's, just type in each number separated by space and an upper case "OR". To find logs of a device like your router, use for example "loghostname To see your saved queries, go to the Admin tab, click on Definitions pull down and choose Query Definitions.

Routers and Linux generally expect the syslog server to run on UDP port Then give the collector a name e. Port: and Proto: UDP. Click Save button. Now go to your router's web page and set up where to send the logs to, which is the ip address of your syslog machine. Your PC was running perfectly on day 1 after hardening, is it doing anything different today? To answer that question, we need baselines. What we want to know is what programs are normally running when we first login.

There are 2 programs we want to get, all free. AutoRuns lists all of the places in the registry where programs are set to auto launch. New entries show up in green. If all green entries are good, then save the file again with todays date, and do the comparison with the new file in the next scheduled check. In recent versions of Windows operating systems, including Windows 10, your firewall is enabled by default.

Easy enough! Windows Firewall is a built-in network security system. Network firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. If you want to check the settings for your Windows Firewall, we have instructions for you here: How to Turn on the Firewall in Windows In Windows 10, you have the Windows Remote Desktop feature that allows you or others!

Remote access allows someone to control everything on your computer as if they are directly connected to it. Unfortunately, hackers can exploit Windows Remote Desktop. In more than one cyberattack, criminals have gained to tried to gain control of remote systems, installed malware, or stolen databases full of personal information.

By default, the feature is disabled. You want to keep the remote access feature turned off, except when you are actively using it. You can prevent viruses and malicious code using your built-in tools in Windows Enterprise editions of Windows 10 include Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection , a security platform that monitors endpoints such as Windows 10 PCs using behavioral sensors.

You should install urgent security updates right away. Some Carbide patches are critical fixes for protecting you from a new type of malware or cyberattack. Your company may have a security policy about updating your operating system too. Depending on your company, your IT team may be responsible for updating your operating system. Annex 1 of ITSG describes these activities in more detail. Information system-level activities are integrated into the information system lifecycle.

These activities ensure the following objectives are met:. Annex 2 of ITSG describes the IT security risk management activities for implementing, operating, and maintaining dependable information systems through their lifecycle.

The figure shows that IT security risk management activities are orchestrated at two distinct levels: the organizational level and the information system level. At the organizational level, the IT security risk management activities conducted by the organizational security authorities e. The key deliverables of the deploy security controls activity are organizational control profiles and organizational IT threat assessment reports. These deliverables are key inputs into the security risk management activities at the information system level.

At the information system level, the IT security risk management activities conducted by IT project managers, security practitioners and developers include:. Information from the operations and maintenance activities provide feedback into the monitor and assess activity at the organizational level. The IT security performance feedback supports the maintain authorization activity under the monitor and assess.

Before reconfiguring or upgrading IT systems or their components, organizations should consider their specific business needs and security requirements by taking the following actions:. All enterprise architecture design and security requirements should be identified before applying the recommendations in this document. A full picture of the complete enterprise architecture will help departments identify the appropriate security features and tools for their business needs and security requirements.

Once security features and tools are implemented, departments should continue to monitor these features and tools as a part of ongoing risk management activities. Regular monitoring ensures security controls continue to be effective. Departments should conduct TRAs as part of their ongoing risk management activities. A TRA should identify business, operational, and security needs. Departments can use the results of their TRAs to identify the Windows 10 configuration that best suits their needs.

If an immediate upgrade or reconfiguration of Windows 10 is not possible, departments should identify and implement interim security risk management strategies and actions based on the results of their TRAs. Departments should consider hardware and firmware when buying and implementing endpoint devices e.

Footnote 6 To leverage new security functionality within Windows 10, the following hardware and firmware components should be in place:. To prevent compromises to Internet-connected assets and infrastructures, we have outlined 10 recommended security actions in ITSM. One of these security actions is to harden operating systems by disabling non-essential ports and services, removing unnecessary accounts, assessing third-party applications, and applying further security controls.

When considering how to harden operating systems, the use of the default, out-of-the-box configuration of Windows 10 does not provide an adequate level of security for GC IT systems, networks, and information assets. We recommend configuring Windows 10 with the security features listed in section 4. With regard to the GPO settings, departments are required to implement the minimum baseline settings outlined in section 5 of this document.

The minimum baseline settings are the standard for GC departments because they provide most endpoint devices with the required level of mitigation against security threats. Departments with systems that may hold sensitive information or assets that, if compromised, could reasonably be expected to cause injury to the individual interest e.

Within the GC context, this category of information is designated as Protected B information. Departments with systems operating in Protected B environments are required to implement the enhanced baseline settings, along with additional measures that are not covered in this document, to help protect sensitive information. If users are running an older version of Windows that is no longer supported, upgrade it to a supported version urgently, and in cases where upgrades are not possible, isolate the outdated systems from the network.

Learn more in our detailed guide to Windows 10 hardening. Hysolate provides a fully managed isolated Workspace for Windows 10, for added security for employees and contractors dealing with risky or sensitive activities on their endpoint device.

This means that one OS can be reserved for corporate access, with strict networking and security policies, and the other can be a more open productivity zone, for accessing necessary but less trusted websites and applications. Admins can harden the Workspace OS by choosing which applications can be used, and they can remotely deploy applications, as well as deploy patches and security updates from the cloud.

Unlike traditional browser isolation solutions, Hysolate isolates your whole OS, including websites, files, documents, applications and even peripherals like USBs and printers.

For users, the Hysolate Workspace mimics their native Windows 10 experience, with minimal lag and latency issues. Another major advantage of WIP is that it provides audit reports that let you track issues as well as remedial actions. In addition to using built-in Windows security tools, described in the previous section, follow this checklist to ensure Windows 10 workstations are adequately protected against security threats.

For more background on hardening operating systems, read our detailed guide to OS hardening. To learn about general Windows hardening best practices and hardening for Windows Server, read our guide to Windows hardening coming soon. It is strongly preferred to configure Windows to only allow the installation of approved applications from controlled software repositories or application marketplaces. This can prevent the following security risks:.

Whitelisting and blacklisting of executables in Windows 10 can be extremely effective at preventing these attacks. It is advised to create a whitelist of files that are allowed to execute on end-user machines, and do this from scratch, without relying on the files currently running on the machine or a list from an application vendor.

The whitelist should explicitly specify executables, libraries, scripts, and installers that are allowed to execute. The Windows Remote Desktop feature in Windows 10 allows users to connect their computer remotely via a network connection.

A user with remote access can control the computer just as a user with direct access. The downside of Remote Desktop is that attackers can exploit remote access to wrest control of your system and steal sensitive information or install malware.

The remote access feature is disabled by default and you can easily disable it once enabled. Make sure you turn off this feature whenever users are not actively using it.

Microsoft has developed PowerShell to enable automated system administration through an integrated interface. This powerful scripting language is a central feature of a system administrator toolkit as it is ubiquitous and allows you to easily control your Microsoft Windows environment.

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