Servers Hardening; How to Enhance Server Security

 Although technology has helped human kind in many ways, it has also introduced its own challenges! One of the main challenges is how to secure this technology against malicious attacks.

In other words, how to protect our information technology infrastructure against unsolicited attacks! Of course, this is a very wide topic that cannot be covered in a short blog! In this blog I will deal with just one of the ways to secure your infrastructure; called servers hardening!

Servers hardening is the process of enhancing security on your servers. Many entities install operating systems with default options. This is not always the ideal case. Depending on the role of the server, some services might not be needed. Disabling those services is one way of servers hardening. Why would disabling services that are enabled by default be better for the server? Other than enhancing server performance, since those services use system resources, decreasing the number of running services decreases the surface of attack!

Another way to harden your servers is to segregate server roles. Rather than running multi-role servers, it is better for security and performance to separate the roles on different servers. In the past this was a costly solution because additional hardware was needed but with the introduction of virtualization, this has become more affordable.

A third way of servers hardening is to rename the default administrator account. This means hackers would have to not only be able to hack the password, but also have to find out the username for the administrator account.

Here are a few more tips:

• Keep your operating system up to date with updates, patches and service packs. This also applies to the hardware drivers and firmware.

• Configure policies for minimum password length and complexity, which will force users to use harder-to-break passwords.

• Disable unneeded network shares and ensure all volumes are using the NTFS file system.

• Restrict remote logins to servers to only authorized personnel.

• Make sure to disable or delete user accounts for employees who have left.

• Install a powerful antivirus.

To read more about Baseline Server Hardening, please visit this link.

Need more help with protecting your information technology infrastructure or with servers hardening?  Call us at 1-866-320-8922 and we’d be happy to help.  For us it’s personal; not just business.