A Guide to System Hardening

Often, modern-day cyber-attackers don’t just exploit vulnerabilities. They tend to discover every possible weakness and try to enter your network, with security misconfigurations being one of them.

In our survey with Enterprise Strategy Group, which interviewed over 100+ CISOs and security leaders, 36% answered that misconfigurations were the point of entry for cyberattacks that happened in their network.

The bottom line is that cyberattacks can happen from any point of your enterprise network. In the case of misconfigurations, system hardening is the only way you can safeguard your network.

Let’s dig deep into system hardening and how you can effectively & impactfully harden your system.

System Hardening 101: Understanding the Basics

Security configurations are properties or parameters of systems or applications that determine their behavior, and deviations in ideal configuration can be devastating. These configurations basically tell the system how to act.

System hardening, sometimes known as configuration hardening, is the process of fixing security misconfigurations and reducing the potential risk they pose to the organization.

System hardening plays a vital role in reducing your organization's attack surface and potentially preventing cyberattacks.

Why is System Hardening Vital?

System hardening is vital, and failing to harden your systems can be devastating. Exploiting security misconfigurations is one of the ways that’s increasingly becoming popular with cyber attackers.

The consequences of not hardening can range from ransomware and data breaches to financial and reputational losses.

Adding to list of dangerous consequences is non-compliance! System hardening closely overlaps with compliance regulations and a byproduct of not hardening your network can be unwanted regulatory attention and hefty fines too.

System Hardening for Compliance

Compliance provides significant benefits like improved security, reputation, and more, and configuration hardening plays a significant role in achieving compliance.

In simple words, system hardening and compliance go hand in hand and often overlap, too. Compliance policies talk about, recommend, and define configuration settings that are needed to achieve and enforce the respective policies. And each compliance regulation, be it HIPAA, NIST, CIS, or STIG, involves fixing misconfigurations according to a set of standard guidelines to ensure that you are compliant with it.

System hardening can be done independently, without the need for a compliance policy, but it can act as a good starting point for organizations to harden their systems and networks.

Types of System Hardening

Based on which component is to be secured, there are multiple types of system hardening. While the basic idea of fixing deviations in configurations of the devices remains the same, the implementation might change based on the device.

1. Operation System Hardening: It is the process of fixing misconfigurations in the operating systems of the different devices in the network, like workstations, servers, and more. OSs involve multiple processes, services, accounts, and permissions that need to be properly configured to harden the operating system effectively.
2. Network Hardening: It is the process of securing the routers, switches, and other devices that make up the network infrastructure. Configurations include access controls, network segmentation, etc., which need to be properly set up based on the compliance policy you chose for effective hardening of the network.
3. Application Hardening: It is the process of securing software applications by fixing and optimizing the configurations in them. The configurations might include disabling features, security settings, and more, as they can lead to unnecessary exposure to risks.
4. Endpoint Hardening: It’s the process of securing and fixing the endpoints in your network. It includes protecting laptops, workstations, servers and more. The process involves fixing misconfigurations in these devices, implementing security controls and patching risks to reduce the attack surface.

Apart from these types of system hardening, IoT hardening, and cloud hardening are some of the other critical configuration hardening types that can impact the overall security and the security posture of your organization.

System Hardening for Compliance

System hardening can be daunting at first glance. But here’s a general step-by-step guide on how you can simplify and harden your system for better security.

1. Identify ALL Devices: The mantra here is you can't protect what you can't see. So, the first step is to identify all the devices in your network and understand the risk they are under. This’ll also help you prioritize the most critical components in your network.
2. Define the Baseline: A vital next step, defining the baseline is a must to ensure your system can be hardened. This baseline should be aligned with best practices and also incorporate any compliance requirements.
3. Scan for Deviations: Once the baselines are defined, now you scan your network for deviations from these guidelines. Once you detect these deviations, you categorize and prioritize them based on how vital the device that has the deviation is and proceed accordingly.
4. Fixing Deviations: Now that you have a clear idea of all the misconfigurations, you must fix them using automated tools or by manually implementing the fixes. It can be in the form of patches, changes in your settings, access controls, and more.
5. Document, Rinse & Repeat: Once the process is set, document it! This ensures that a repeatable process is set. The last step of the process is to repeat it as often as possible. This will allow you to monitor, manage, and confidently harden your systems.

This simple 5-step blueprint, if followed, can drastically improve your cyberdefense AND enforce a good chunk of compliance as well.

Hardening your Systems with Saner Platform

Saner Platform is a Continuous Vulnerability and Exposure Management solution perfect for all your IT security needs, from vulnerability management to system configuration hardening and compliance enforcement. It is a combination of advanced risk detection and remediation features in sync with built-in endpoint controls to enforce compliance policies like PCI, HIPAA, NIST, etc., alongside safely and securely hardening your network’s configurations.

Saner Platform, with its Compliance Management module, can assess and fix configuration issues in 5 minutes, helping you align and accelerate your compliance goals.

So how do you do it?

With the Saner Platform Compliance Module, you can detect misconfigurations and deviations from compliance policies with ease and fix them immediately. Once Saner Platform is implemented in your organization, the entire process is reduced to a few quick steps. Here is a step-by-step overview of how to achieve it:

1. Once Saner Platform is implemented in your network, the Saner agent scans the devices and instantly gives you an overview of all the vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security risks present in your network. Further, based on the selected benchmarks, Saner Platform also provides detailed information on each of the misconfigurations existing in the devices.

2. To select and enforce a compliance policy, you can go to the Benchmarks section, and you can select and customize the different controls and enforce them. The categorization is based on the device family and provides you with a granular level of control over which device you’d like to enforce.

3. Once the configurations are set, Saner Platform automatically scans and detects the misconfigurations and deviations, and you can select and instantly fix them with a click of a button.

4. You also get granular customization while applying the fixes to the network’s misconfigurations. You can customize the reboot controls, add remediation scripts, you can choose what you’d like to customize while applying the fixes.

5. Saner Platform fixes and patches the selected misconfigurations, and once done, the Saner agent quickly scans the network again, and you can see the results yourself.

Additional Security Controls for System Hardening

Saner Platform, with its Endpoint Management module, provides more than 100+ security controls to give you granular and pin-point customizations and control to fix misconfigurations and rapidly reduce the attack surface. From application and device controls to startup and security, Saner Platform can detect and fix issues to completely harden your system.

Automating System Hardening for your IT Network

Compliance should not be a one-time step, and configuration hardening is critical to ensure there are no deviations in the dynamic IT network. To achieve compliance continuously and automatically detect and fix the detected misconfigurations, Saner Platform can also automate the entire process to ensure any new misconfigurations or configuration drifts are immediately addressed.

1. Clicking on the Automation button allows you to select the devices you wish to enforce automation to. But it is recommended to select all the devices and not miss out on anything else. This will allow you to automate the fixing of deviations and misconfigurations in the network.

2. By clicking on Create Automation Rule, you can choose the severity of the misconfigurations to fix and make changes accordingly. Once selected, you can also customize the automation rule with granular controls like reboot control, desktop notifications, remediation scripts, and more. Additionally, you can select when you would like to fix the misconfigurations, be it daily, weekly, or monthly.

Streamline, simplify, and speed up your compliance and system hardening with Saner Platform’s automation capabilities. Additionally, leverage its natively integrated risk remediation to reduce your attack surface as well.

Conclusions:

System & configuration hardening is critical in safeguarding your IT infrastructure and makes up a significant chunk of your IT attack surface. It is paramount to continuously monitor configuration deviations and misconfigurations and harden them proactively to mitigate attacks and reduce the attack surface effectively.

Configuration Hardening and effective cyber-attack prevention are closely linked to each other, and effectively performing them can be a challenge. But Saner Platform Continuous Vulnerability and Exposure Management provides a one-stop solution to detect security risks, misconfigurations, and more and instantly remediate them with its built-in vulnerability mitigation engine.