5 Key Components of Cybersecurity Hardening

Hardening (or system hardening) considers all the flaws and entry points that could be targeted by attackers to compromise your system. While innovative and determined cybercriminals will look for any opportunity to breach your security for their own gain, hardening shrinks the surface as much as possible, adding more difficulty to the attacker’s efforts.

The benefits of hardening

Hardening the system is more than just a one-time exercise; It requires continuous effort. However, it’s not all for nothing, as a hardened system provides many benefits, including:

• Increased system functionality through best practices and reduction of unnecessary programs and vulnerabilities. As such, organizations experience fewer operational issues and inconsistencies, reduced risk of misconfigurations, and less friction.
• A higher level of security by reducing the attack surface. Organizations and end users have a lower risk of data breaches, malware, unauthorized account access, and other malicious activity.
• Streamlining compliance and auditing due to reduced environmental complexity. Hardening eliminates unnecessary or nonessential systems, accounts, and programs, resulting in a more stable configuration and a more transparent environment.

As a multifaceted topic, hardening can overwhelm organizations when planning or revising their security strategy. There are different types of hardening to be aware of, which can be divided into five key categories: configuration, application, software, operating system, and server hardening.

For example, setting all server ports open at all times is a tempting invitation for criminals to break into your system, using whatever they find for their own personal gain. Closing all ports is, of course, impossible. Hardening finds the “sweet spot” of security and functionality.

Achieving configuration hardening takes time, as you will need to evaluate the components of your environment and test configurations and interdependencies before they can be adopted. This may mean testing and implementing changes during planned downtime, depending on your environment and requirements.

Watch out for configuration drift, where systems inevitably drift away from your established company standard. Capture these changes and validate a policy update or push them back into compliance.

In the modern workforce, applications and software go hand in hand to support end users with different needs. The importance of application hardening thus also extends to the application running within your organization. This is especially true if your organization is writing its own software or customizing off-the-shelf packages.

The hardening software relies on three steps:

• Analysis – includes static and dynamic analysis to discover and fix weak points, as well as audit the current scope and risk profile of software applications and development work processes.
• Transformation – Using diversification and obfuscation techniques to thwart attacks.
• Monitoring – to support ongoing assessment and protection, including alerts or activation actions to protect critical systems or data.

An exploited software vulnerability can be a gateway to costly and disruptive outcomes, and software hardening will help prevent critical data from falling into the wrong hands.

An important aspect of hardening your environment is at the operating system level. Operating system hardening is critical to the effectiveness of your cybersecurity strategy and works in conjunction with software and application hardening.

Essentially, OS hardening uses patches and security protocols to secure your operating systems. The focus of OS hardening is to increase the protection of hardware and software assets, thereby maximizing protection at every level.

Consider the following elements in your OS hardening procedure:

• Firewall configurations – limit traffic to necessary ports, and control outgoing and incoming traffic flows only to what is needed for normal business activity.
• Defining user roles – Create policies and access levels that limit users to only the functions necessary to do their jobs.
• Protect all systems from common threats – use anti-malware and endpoint detection and response solutions.
• Isolate – Protect your environment by isolating workloads and data whenever possible.
• Remove unnecessary items – this includes applications, ports, resources, peripherals and operating system features.
• Patching and updating – Use automatic patching and update installation whenever possible. Make sure you deploy updates manually when automatic updates are not possible.
• Workflow development – ​​This includes continuous monitoring and ongoing evaluations of operating systems.

Each operating system will have the details required to harden the operating system. MacOS, Windows, and Linux systems have different levels of out-of-the-box protection and ambitious cyber protection, so make sure your strategy takes these individual needs into account.

There are many metaphors that can be used to illustrate the importance of servers in your environment: the backbone, the general, the card dealer. Whatever you call them, your servers are the gatekeepers of everything precious and valuable in your environment.

Server hardening is the process of securing server ports, permissions, functions and components to reduce the attack surface. True server hardening relies on a security framework that takes the needs of each server into account. Your web server has different security needs than your database server, for example, due to accessibility and functionality.

Consider some key aspects to help you get started with server hardening:

SCM helps establish and maintain a baseline of security in your environment by monitoring your assets and sending actionable alerts if attention is required. The platform also enforces ongoing compliance through global standards or custom policies so your business can rest easy.

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