Using Security Tools Tutorials
Host Security / Windows Host Lockdown Tools (SCAT) pt. 2
Subtitles of the Movie (Using Security Tools / Host Security / Windows Host Lockdown Tools (SCAT) pt. 2)
Let's go ahead and look actually at the security settings now. Let's go and click on account policies for example and the first thing we're going to see is password policy. Now, what you're going to see here is the settings we looked at earlier but here is the database setting and here is the computer setting. Now, the computer setting is what you're actually configured right now. The database settings is what the template is configured at right now. As you can see by little green checkmarks here and you can also look at the settings themselves, these match so right now your computer is configured to match that security template. Now, let's go ahead and look at other settings. Let's look at account policy. There are some things that are not defined or not analyzed and if we click on one of those, it shows that this setting was not analyzed by the database and we can define this policy if we like. Right now there's no policy set in other words. Let's go ahead and continue down and we'll look at local policies. We have audit policy, user right assignment and security options. We'll click on audit policy. We can see from the database settings and the computer settings, those match. Auditing is not defined and not turned On. We look at user rights assignments. Now we're starting to see some things. For the most part, a lot of these settings match; people who can access the computer from the network for example. The database setting shows that we have administrators, backup operators, power users, the users group and the everyone group. Computer setting is the same so these match. Where you see blanks is where it's not configured at all but they still match. Now look down here. Deny access to this computer from the network; there's a difference. The security template actually shows one thing and the computer is set for another. WE click on that, we see that right now the database setting is that it disallows access to the computer from the network using the guest account so someone can't use the built-in guest account, access it from the network from a different computer. The computer setting does not define that or is not denying that access so we might want to change that in the database if we so decide to do that. Anything you change you're only changing the database; you're actually not changing on the computer right now. Let's look at another one where they don't match. Log on as a service; right now there's nothing that's defined for the database setting for the template but the computer does define something so we can make a change. If we make a change, that will affect the database only. It will not affect the computer at all. Right now we're only affecting the template that's loaded so we can go through here and look at the various options if we like and look and see how some of those are configured. By and large a lot of these are either not defined, not configured rather or they match. There's a few in there so let's say if you imported this, this setup security template into your computer, you actually would not be changing a lot right now. Now, there's a couple different things we can do once we've analyzed and once we've changed some things in the database to suit our needs. Now that we've done that, what we might want to do is export this template out. We can get this template to actually match our computer or we can make it so it's changed and it's pretty much the way we want our computer configured. So we can go ahead and change that and make, we'll call this Test for example and save this and now we have another template that we could use if we like that we can go use on other computers once we have it configured the way we want it. Let's look at one more, one more option you can use here. We're going to right click on security configuration analysis and we also have the computer, configure computer now. If we make this change we're actually pulling the changes from the database into the computer. We're actually changing the computer settings at this point. When we did it analyze, we weren't doing that. We were just looking at things. Once we configure the computer, we're actually making those changes so you have to be careful. Before we do that, let's go ahead and look at another template. Let's go ahead and look at open database and let's go ahead and go with a different one. Let's go, let's look at a secure one. So we'll open up a secure database. We'll call it and let's look at a highly-secure workstation. Let's compare how a highly-secure workstation security settings should be compared to what we have and let's go ahead and right click on that, analyze the computer now. It's going to log and it's going to look at the settings. Now let's see what the differences are. Password policies; uh-oh. We're seeing some Xs here because a secure configuration is different than what we have. We're seeing where a secure configuration wants to remember 24 last passwords where as right now we don't remember passwords on our computer settings so a user could use the same passwords over and over. If we reconfigure that, they would not be able to use the last 24 words they've used. So that's a little bit more of a secure configuration. Other security configuration changes for higher security: minimum password age, minimum password length and so forth. So if we change these things in the database, we're actually lessening or changing the security level. Let's say we want to use the secure template but right now maybe we think that 24 is too long so let's change that to maybe ten. We only want to remember the past ten, not the past 24 so let's apply. Again, this only changes in the database so let's say we've made that change. Now we want to export that out to a template to use across our network. So let's call this VTC Secure and that's the template we're going to use to secure all our VTC computers in our VTC domain. So we save that and so now we can take that template and take it across the network to a different computer and apply it to different computers and it will have the secure settings plus the settings we changed. Now let's say we want to go ahead and apply that now. WE would click computer now. Again, I caution you on this. There's a lot of settings we didn't look at and some of those higher-security templates also configure the way our computers talk on the network so you actually may break things by increasing security through these templates. That's why you really have to test this and go through each node and look at what the differences are and how they might affect network communication, usability and functionality. Remember that it's a balance between security and functionality. The more secure something is, usually the less functional it is and vice-versa. So that's how you would actually look at that and make changes to your computer and then take those changes and propagate them out to many different computers on your network. So together those are the security configuration analysis tools. You've got the security templates and you've got the security configuration analysis tools so you've got some really good tools there that will help you configure host security and they're built into Windows and they're free to use of course and they're very easy to manage. You just have to take the time to go through the settings and understand how they're going to affect your computer and your network. So again, I recommend highly that you test these first before you actually click the configure computer button because it's hard to go back once you do that. So we, once we get done with this we can actually save this MMC so we can open it again later. It'll show up in our administrative tools now and we can save that now and so next time we need to open up this MMC, it will show up that way. So that is your host security configuration tools for Windows; the security configuration and analysis toolset.
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 |
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