5 Key Components of Cybersecurity Hardening

System hardening is more than just a one-and-done exercise; it requires continuous effort. It’s not all for naught, however, as a hardened system provides many benefits, including:

• Increased system functionality through best practices and the reduction of programs and unnecessary points of vulnerability. As such, organizations experience fewer operational issues and incompatibilities, 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 nefarious activity.
• Streamlined compliance and auditing due to reduced environmental complexity. Hardening eliminates redundant or unessential systems, accounts, and programs, resulting in a more stable configuration and more transparent environment.

As a multi-faceted topic, hardening may overwhelm organizations when designing or amending their security strategy. There are different types of hardening to be aware of, which can be broken down into five key categories: Configuration, application, software, operating system, and server hardening.

In the modern workforce, applications and software go hand-in-hand to support end users with various needs. The importance of hardening applications thereby extends to the application that run within your organization.  This is especially true if your organization writes its own software or customizes off-the-shelf packages.

Hardening software relies on three phases:

• Analysis – including static, and dynamic analysis to discover and correct vulnerabilities, as well as auditing the current scope and risk profile of software applications and development workflows.
• Transformation – using diversification and obfuscation techniques to thwart attacks.
• Monitoring – to support ongoing assessment and protection, including alerts or triggering actions to protect critical systems or data.

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

An important aspect of hardening your environment is at the OS level. OS hardening is critical to the effectiveness of your cybersecurity strategy and runs 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 these elements in your OS hardening procedure:

• Firewall configurations – Restrict traffic to necessary ports, and control egress and ingress traffic flows to only what is needed for normal business operations.
• Define user roles – Create policies and access levels that restrict users to only the necessary functions for the performance of 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 where possible.
• Eliminate unnecessary items – This includes applications, ports, resources, peripherals, and OS features.
• Patch and update – Use automatic patch and update installation where possible. Ensure that you manually deploy updates when automatic updates are not possible.
• Develop a workflow – This includes continuous monitoring and regular assessments of operating systems.

Each operating system will have its specifics required for OS hardening. MacOS, Windows, and Linux systems have differing levels of out-of-the-box and aspirational cybersecurity protection, so ensure that your strategy considers these individualized needs.

There are a lot of metaphors that can be used to illustrate the importance of the 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 a 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 a few key aspects to help you get started with server hardening:

System hardening in cybersecurity is a multilayered approach, and your environment is only as safe as your weakest link, that is, the least protected element.