Using Security Tools Tutorials
Host Security / Windows Host Lockdown Tools (SCAT) pt. 1
Subtitles of the Movie (Using Security Tools / Host Security / Windows Host Lockdown Tools (SCAT) pt. 1)
Now that we've talked about Linux-based host lockdown tools, let's go ahead and look at some Windows-based host lockdown tools. We'll look in particular at the SCAT or security configuration and analysis toolset. Now, this toolset is basically MMC, Microsoft Management Console-based tools that are pretty much already included in your Windows box. All you have to do is configure them and use them. Now, what they're used for is to apply various security configuration settings in order to securely lockdown a host and what they do is enable you to apply different presets security configuration settings called templates to computers. Now, these templates can be templates that you actually configure yourself or that you get from your Enterprise-level administration or security folks or even ones that you can download from Microsoft or other sites that are basically preconfigured for the role that your computer serves, such as a e-mail server and so forth. But you don't have to go with the recommended settings; you can also tweak these for your own environment. Now, Windows 2000 and up pretty much can use these templates although how you use them and how you install them and configure them differs a little bit between different editions of Windows. For example, it differs a little bit between Windows 2000 XP, 2003, Server 2008 and Vista and so forth but we're going to look at them on an XP box and so you'll know how they're used, the differences in how to administer them aren't that great. Now, all you really have to do is configure the security configuration and analysis toolset MMC and then you'll analyze the computer and compare it to a particular security template. You'll make changes to the database settings and then you'll configure the computer. There's different stages of this and you have the ability to look and see how it's going to look first before you actually configure it and you want to do this. In fact, you want to test this whole process out first on either computers in a lab or computers you hook up to the network so you can see how this is going to work. The reason why you want to do this is that it's difficult to reverse these settings once they're applied so test this out in the lab first. Now, there's more security tools out there available that just the SCAT. The SCAT comes basically with Windows so why not use it? But there are other third-party tools out there as well that you can use. You may have to pay for some of those tools, some of those are free. We're going to show you how to use the tools that are built into Windows first. So let's go ahead and take a look at the security configuration and analysis toolset. The security configuration and analysis toolset actually is already built into your computer but you have to configure it. What you have to do is actually create a Microsoft Management Console for it so you'd simply go to Start and Run and type in MMC and enter that and you're going to get a blank Microsoft Management Console and what you want to do from here is go to Action, rather File and click Add Remove Snap-In. You're going to add different snap-ins to this management console so click Add and then you can scroll down through the available snap-ins here and what we're looking for is two particular things. We're looking for security configuration analysis and we're going to add that and we're also looking for security templates. We're going to add that. Together these normally make up what's considered by most security professionals to be the security configuration analysis toolset. So we can click OK here. Let's make this a little bit bigger so we can see it better and what we've got is two different tools here in the MMC that we can use and we've got security configuration analysis and we've got security templates and let's look at the security templates first. Now, security templates are basically text-based files. They're templates that you can use to configure security on your computer. Now, there's different ones that come with your computer by default. Compatible workstation; this is a lesser security template that relaxes or loosens security settings so your computer can be compatible with older applications. You also have security templates which are geared toward specific computer roles, such as this one is high-security domain controller. If you're not running a domain controller and you're just running an XP box, you probably don't want to use this one. There's also high-security workstation, a root security workstation, a secure domain controller, secure workstation and even one that you can use to configure your setup security. You might want to use this one in fact to go ahead and compare what your computer is right out of the box and see what this one is make security configuration changes and then use this whenever you set up a workstation right out of the box. Now, each of these security templates has basically the same nodes listed in them. You have account policies, local policies, Event Log settings, stricter group settings, security services, registry settings and file system settings. I you expand one of these nodes, you'll see that account policies, for example, covers the password policy, account lockout policy and your Cerberus policy and you can further expand these down and see what's inside them. For example, your password policy is going to talk about password history, the password aging, password length and complexity requirement in storing the password using reversible encryption; so all of these different settings can go down to a very fine grain level. Now, what you want to do is review which security template you think you might want to use. In this case we're just going to go with the setup security one. We're just going to compare our computer the way it is to set up security to see if it matches the setup security template. So what we want to do, if you go up here and click on security configuration analysis, it's going to give you some instructions there. You can't really see anything in it right now. What you want to do is right click on the security configuration analysis portion and then click open database and what we can do, we have a database in here where we can go ahead and go with a new one. What happens when you create a database is you're creating a file, a placeholder for that security template and your security settings to both go into and merge and compare. So the security database doesn't really do anything to your computer yet. You just need a placeholder for them to compare settings. So let's go ahead and call this Test or we could use the existing VTC one; it doesn't matter. We're going to click Open. Now, once we decide on our database, then it wants to know which template we'd like to compare out computer's security settings to. I'm going to go ahead and compare it to setup security first because I kind of want to see how it compares with setup security level settings. Now that we got that done, we actually can right click on it now and we get some different options available to us. We can analyze the computer or configure the computer. Now, let me tell you the difference. Analyze the computer now basically allows you to simply compare the settings of your computer and the settings with the template you selected. If you select configure computer now, you're actually making those changes. So I would not recommend that you do that right off the bat. I would recommend that you analyze first to see what the settings are, to see what the differences are going to be. It's going to allow you to send error messages to a log and you can select whichever log file you like. Then it's going to start analyzing. Right now it's comparing the computer settings, security settings against the settings in the template. It's going to give me a comparison of user rights assigned, restricted groups, the registry settings, the file system settings, system services and security policy. And once it gets done with that, and this can take a couple of minutes actually, once it gets done with that it's going to present that information to me and I can actually go through and look and see what the differences are between these two settings; between my computer settings and the template settings. Now, I can tell you that setup security is not very secure. It's very basic, right out of the box type stuff so most of the information we're going to see is probably going to be similar computer settings and how you can tell that the settings are matched is that there's a little green checkmark there. If you see settings that have a little red X, then you know those settings don't match and those are the ones that you kind of want to look at to see what the differences are. Setup security may be more secure or your existing security settings may be more secure but either way, you can go and look at those and determine that.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Using Security Tools |
| Author: | Bobby Rogers |
| SKU: | 34068 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-88-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-12-04 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 91 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
