ISSC342 discussion response

ISSC342 discussion response

Hello,

I need two responses of at least 150 words each for the below students discussions for this week. Also in the bold below are the questions the students at answering.

Instructions:

1. Discuss some hardening techniques or products you have used for Workstations

2. List any observations, tips or questions about this lab that would prove helpful to fellow students prior to midnight on Wednesday and comment on other student posts with value added comments (not simply agreeing) by midnight Sunday for full credit consideration.

Student one:

Class,

Here’s my submission for our final forum this week:

1. Discuss some hardening techniques or products you have used for Workstations

There are a multitude of different hardening techniques which can be used for workstations depending on capabilities, needs, and resources. As I’m not personally involved in the information security section of my organization, I haven’t had the opportunity to implement techniques over a system or for workstations other than my own so I’ll just address the ones I’ve used at home. I don’t really use my home computer for anything other than homework and an occasional work email here and there. Either way, I try and take the basic security measures or hardening techniques. After some of our labs, I made sure to go back and review the different firewall settings that I have currently enabled or disabled on my system. I looked at the different firewall domains to determine whether or not any of the three were mistakenly disabled. I also reviewed the different rules to see if any of them were running questionable services. I try and scan for vulnerabilities/malware regularly too. We did a lab for browser hardening too, and I went back and took a look at my browser settings to ensure that I was browsing in a more secure, and private manner as well. I ensure that I update and patch my system when new ones come out but always make sure I read what they’re patching, mostly for knowledge’s sake.

2. List any observations, tips or questions about this lab that would prove helpful to fellow students prior to midnight on Wednesday and comment on other student posts with value added comments (not simply agreeing) by midnight Sunday for full credit consideration.

This week’s lab wasn’t highly technical and didn’t involve numerous commands or writing scripts, so nothing too complicated. I did run into a little snafu where I probably closed out of SCM too quickly because the file we’re supposed to export to the desktop didn’t show up. I repeated the necessary steps but waited a little longer after choosing to export the SCM file and sure enough, it showed up. Taking your time always seems to be a recurring theme for these labs. While I learned a lot over the course, thank goodness this was our last one!

Best wishes going forward to everyone! It’s been a pleasure.

Respectfully,

Shonnie

Student two:

HARDEING TECHNIQUES

Though out this quarter we have learned many different products and techniques that come into play when hardening operating systems.

we have learned about a lot of tools and techniques to harden and secure operating systems. One of the most useful tips in hardening my workstation is to ensure you have updated anti-virus software, configure the Firewall correctly, encrypted your data, secure the BitLocker keys safely, have the Active Directory as the main. This protects your workstation on so many levels.

You can follow the Seven Domains of IT infrastructure which are, User Domain, Workstation Domain, LAN Domain, LAN-to-WAN Domain, Remote Access Domain, WAN Domain, and System/Application Domain.

Disabling or renaming default credentials for build-in accounts because this is one of the most important steps in system hardening, and by during so you will avoid Hacker who use keystroke and mouse click because this is the first attack vector.

The best way to prevent an attack is to conduct Reconnaissance frequently, you conduct Reconnaissance by scanning your network to expose or to discover the open ports and Vulnerabilities before an attacker discover the open ports in your network or vulnerabilities in your network, because the attacker conduct Reconnaissance first before they can attack your network, Penetration test is the best way to prevent an intrusion. The most way of preventing an intrusion is to setup “Intrusion Prevention System” by using Firewalls, or Intrusion Detection System (IDS).

Another layer of hardening is to uninstall unnecessary programs. This not only frees up space on your workstation, but it minimizes the possibility of unauthorized users running unwanted code or malicious logic on your system. In addition, you should also use firewalls to give your system another level of perimeter defense because any system without a firewall is nothing in terms of protection. between hardening your system against potential threats and maintaining usability

-Exavier