Security Hardening

What is Security Hardening?

Security hardening is the process of enhancing the security posture of a system or network by implementing a series of proactive measures to reduce vulnerabilities and mitigate potential risks. This includes configuring systems, applications, and infrastructure to adhere to best security practices, such as disabling unnecessary services, enforcing strong authentication mechanisms, applying patches and updates regularly, and configuring firewalls and intrusion detection systems. The goal of security hardening is to minimize the attack surface and strengthen defenses against cyber threats, reducing the likelihood of successful attacks and enhancing overall resilience to security breaches and unauthorized access.

Security hardening techniques

According to Forbes, hardening your attack surface is the best line of defense against cyberattacks. In today’s landscape, where cyberattacks dominate the headlines, ensuring your IT environment is secure is essential. If there are simple steps or process changes you can take to harden your ecosystem, now is the time to act.

How to start security hardening?

Begin by identifying and reducing attack vectors in your environment. Striking a balance is key. After all, the only way to achieve a 100% safe environment is to eliminate everything: no systems, no processes, no customer or employee data—and no business. All environments will have risks, but your goal should be to eliminate unnecessary risks. Consider asking yourself these questions:

• Do you have machines still connected to the network but no longer in use?
• Are there dormant subscriptions to cloud tools?
• Have you deactivated credentials and accounts for former employees?

Addressing these questions ensures no loose ends leave your system vulnerable.

Pro Tip: Network Discovery tools can provide visibility into unused assets, such as drivers, services, or software, and alert you to dormant systems and processes. Effective IT asset discovery is crucial for identifying and securing potential vulnerabilities.

Security hardening ideas

Security hardening can take many forms, but once you feel confident that there’s nothing opening you up to risk that could be removed, it’s time to look at your existing processes. Yes, you need to take payments and customer data, but who needs access to that data? If you have cloud resources which hold your most sensitive data, these should be enforced with the tightest level of privileges, or if on-premises, segmented away from the rest of your environment. Think about using the Principle of Least Privilege.

Each user should have only the access they need to do their role, and no further. If this means more access requests – that’s a reasonable trade-off to ensure sensitive data is secured. This is a great way to harden your environment against a potential threat. Other ideas that can make a real difference without requiring huge investment or change are:

Workforce training: Make sure that all employees and clients have regular training on the latest threats and challenges. After all, 95% of security breaches are due to human error, according to IBM. Hardening your environment also means hardening the people who use that environment.

Automating patching and updates: Patches and security updates should be part of your business as usual, but are you relying on manual effort to ensure your machines are up to date? Both software and hardware patches can be updated automatically, ensuring that you never have a gap where attackers can take advantage of your delay.

Password management: Ultimately, a weak credential is a weak environment. In today’s connected world it only takes one user’s account to be breached to open the whole environment up to risk through lateral movement across a network. That’s why resetting default passwords, using hashing in password hygiene, and onboarding a solution for password rotation and secrets management is so important.

Data transfer processes: Many organizations fail to think about the way they store and send data, despite it being a huge part of how they work. Look at the SaaS tools you use to collaborate, send files, or discuss sensitive information. Do they, and the other applications you rely on, all encrypt their data in transit as well as at rest?

Keep really good records: Documentation is an important part of security hardening, and one which often gets forgotten. If something is unusual, even if it isn’t immediately dangerous – write it down! This will help your colleagues troubleshoot if the situation escalates, and provide better intelligence for incident response in case of a threat.

Windows 10 inherent hardening processes

Don’t forget—your operating system likely includes built-in tools for device hardening. For example, Windows 10 offers features like Device Guard, Credential Guard, Application Guard, and Exploit Guard. These tools enhance system security and are available by default when setting up the machine.

Ensure Ransomware protection is activated, as it’s not toggled on by default. For added safety, consider using Microsoft Edge in a sandbox environment. This setup enables secure browsing in scenarios where a link seems almost safe but warrants extra caution.

Security hardening in linux

Security hardening in Linux involves implementing measures such as disabling unnecessary services, applying regular updates and patches, configuring firewalls, enabling encryption, enforcing strong user authentication, setting file system permissions, implementing intrusion detection systems, and utilizing security-enhanced Linux (SELinux) or AppArmor to enforce mandatory access controls.

Atera and security hardening

Atera can aid in security hardening by providing features such as automated patch management to ensure systems are up to date, remote monitoring and management capabilities to identify vulnerabilities, integrated antivirus and malware protection, automation of security tasks, and access controls to restrict user permissions. Additionally, Atera offers network security monitoring tools and integrates with third-party security solutions to enhance overall cybersecurity posture.