this is susan bradley for cso online not a day that goes by that we don't see or read or have to
deal with some sort of security issue from malware on our desktops to ransomware to supply chain
attacks to patches we have to deal with there's a headline every day that makes us stop and think
of what we need to do often on normal networks use the cso make choices and sometimes you need
help in deciding what is the important thing to do recently the minor organization put together
the defend matrix which kind of helps to lay out those items that you need to pay attention to
right now i'm going to target this section on the left called harden
and it talks about some of the items that you need to look at now typically in a network environment
application hardening may be outside of the the emphasis that you can do typically you
purchase stuff where you don't have the ability to influence the hardening of the application
now you can talk to the vendor ask them if they're doing any of these steps
dead code elimination exception handler pointer validation process segment execution
address offset randomization and for each one of these items you can click on the item
to find out more information again talk to your vendors this is one that you may not
have a lot of ability to control you may have to discuss it with them and see what they're doing
next up with credential hardening this is where you do start to have more direct control over
what can you what you can do in these situations multi-factor authentication is one that we love
and we hate at the same time it's one of the easiest things to do in terms of
protecting your environment as well as one of the hardest things to implement
especially if you have mixtures of applications if you have users that need different kinds of tokens
if you have different two-factor tokens if you have phone policies bottom line this
may take a lot of time to implement but if you do take the time to do it it has
an excellent chance of helping you out in the long term another one to look at is a strong password
policy this is one that needs both policies at the domain as well as an education side of it
it's not enough to just merely set the policy you need to educate the end user as to
what a good policy and especially these days how to handle passwords correctly how to ensure that
they're not reused how to ensure that they're stored securely how to ensure that they're not
fished out meaning that someone can't call in and pretend to be the help desk and get that password
message hardening this is either easy because it's done by your mail vendor or it's a little
bit harder especially if you have multiple mail processes that you use in your organization let's
say you do bulk emailing for purposes of marketing and you use a third party service for that
this can be a little bit tricky to get all of the spfs and the dkims set just so
you're gonna probably have to go back and forth between reading mail headers and sending
out test messages to see if you've got it right sometimes it also means working with a third party
bulk mail vendor to see what they need as far as settings in your own domain name
so sometimes you have to get specific settings from your vendors and put in your dns records
last but certainly not least is the whole category of platform hardening now this is what
we typically spend a lot of time on especially on patch tuesday the software update section
but we may not spend as much time as we should on these other sections
disk encryption in particular if we don't encrypt the disk we don't we're not protecting that data
appropriately and microsoft with windows 11 and their tps and some other processor mandates
are going to push us more into this bootloader authentication
driver load integrity checking tpm boot integrity these three we don't tend to do a lot right now
unless you're in a regulated industry and those three are going to be pushed down to us
due to windows 11 hardware mandates so you get the idea that take a look at this section over
here in hardening and see what options you can do in your organization and what you can do
to strengthen and defend yourself better until next time this is susan bradley for cso online