discussion 10

After reading the chapters I gained so much knowledge, the first interesting fact I learned was the definition of hardening an operating system which is basically the process of ensuring that an operating system is more secure and this involves numerous configurations of network and system components adequately. What surprised me was that I thought I knew some of the steps involved in hardening my windows OS for prevention of cyber attacks but I clearly did not. I was able to learn and grasp them including; being able to determine the number of times TCP retransmits, using the NTFS file system, using Loyal Security Policy, setting account lockout policies, using Boot-level Passwords or BIOS, adjustment of retransmission of SYN-ACKS, encryption of Temp folders or documents, disabling multiple potentially dangerous services like telnet, Windows Messenger, disabling file sharing, auto-logins, Remote Assistance, Remote Desktop, Enumeration of SIDs and disabling IRDP. On the contrary, I found the steps for hardening Windows OS more difficult as compared to hardening other OS like Redhat or FreeBSD system (Hassan & Hijazi, 2017).

An article that highlights the topics of this week that I read was Martin Brinkmann’s “Harden Windows with Hard Configurator”. Martin begins by defining a hard Configurator as a program for Microsoft Windows OS that is free and is used to harden the OS or manage software restriction policies. This hardening tool offers clients with options to harden the Windows operating system by making security-related changes way much easier to the registry despite the fact that it is not easy to work with. One is able to carry out hardening processes with the program including enabling or disabling software restriction policies, windows scripting host, windows defender, untrusted fonts, execution from removable disks, remote assistance, remote registry and other tasks related to security of the OS (Brinkmann, 2018).