network hardening best practices

Providing transparency and guidance to help customers best protect their network is a top priority. SNMP provides information on the health of network devices. Here are four essential best practices for network security management: #1 Network Security Management Requires a Macro View. © 2021 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved. The first is that it lets you establish a baseline of what your typical network traffic looks like. Utilize a secure HTTP server as described in the Encrypt Management Sessions section of the Cisco Guide to Harden Cisco IOS Devices. This information should be protected from malicious users that want to leverage this data in order to perform attacks against the network. Networks would be much safer if you disable access to network services that aren't needed and enforce access restrictions. Apply User Access Restrictions. The idea here is that the printers won't need access to the same network resources that employees do. Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network Secure As a user with access to sensitive corporate or government information at work, you are at risk at home. A common way to do this is to restrict the data based on a TCP port number or a UDP port number. This works by identifying common flood attack types like sin floods or UDP floods. They're subject to a lot more potentially malicious traffic which increases the risk of compromise. Analysis of logs would involve looking for specific log messages of interests, like with firewall logs. Customers who do use the feature—and need to leave it enabled—can use access control lists (ACLs) to block incoming traffic on TCP port 4786 (the proper security control). ● various authentication systems and types. © 2007 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Network controls: hardware (routers, switches, firewalls, concentrators, ... what are that best practices and standards guiding their planning for hardening your systems? In this instruction will describes the best practices and security hardening configuration for a new Cisco switch to secure it and also increases the overall security of a network infrastructure in an enterprise data center. Connections from the internal network to known address ranges of Botnet command and control servers could mean there's a compromised machine on the network. Specific best practice recommendations for each of the targeted protocols listed in the joint technical alert are provided here. You can do this through network traffic monitoring and logs analysis. Keep Your Servers’ Operating Systems Updated. A strong encryption will beat any hacker anytime. Network Software Hardening 5:00. Most enterprises rely on employee trust, but that won’t stop data from leaving the … Also, make sure all the applications installed on your server are not using default username and password. Google. If you want to learn more about how to configure a firewall rules and Linux and other implementations, take a look at the references in the supplementary reading. Stop Data Loss. Network Hardening Best Practices 8:49. Another very important component of network security is monitoring and analyzing traffic on your network. It watches for signs of an attack on a system, and blocks further attempts from a suspected attack address. It's actually one of the benefits of network separation, since we can control and monitor the flow of traffic between networks more easily. Correlation analysis is the process of taking log data from different systems, and matching events across the systems. The database server is located behind a firewall with default rules to … You can read more about Splunk and the supplementary readings in this lesson. For each of the targeted protocols, Cisco advocates that customers follow best practices in the securing and hardening of their network devices. Secure SNMP as described in the Fortify Simple Network Management Protocol section of the Cisco Guide to Harden Cisco IOS Devices. It is highly recommended that customers follow the best practices contained in this document to mitigate the effects of the attacks referenced in US-CERT Alert TA18-106A. Some very basic configuration changes can be made immediately to reduce attack surface while also implementing best practices, and more advanced changes allow routers to pass compliance scans and formal audits. Mikrotik routers straight out of the box require security hardening like any Arista, Cisco, Juniper, or Ubiquiti router. It's important to know how to implement security measures on a network environment, so we'll show you some of the best practices to protect an organization's network. It can also be configured to generate alerts, and allows for powerful visualization of activity based on logged data. Maintaining control and visibility of all network users is vital when … At the device level, this complexity is apparent in even the simplest of “vendor hardening guideline” documents. YOUR USE OF THE INFORMATION ON THE DOCUMENT OR MATERIALS LINKED FROM THE DOCUMENT IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. This is usually called a post fail analysis, since it's investigating how a compromise happened after the breach is detected. Implicit deny is a network security concept where anything not explicitly permitted or allowed should be denied. Follow the guidelines on warning banners as described in the Warning Banners section of the Cisco Guide to Harden Cisco IOS Devices. Network Hardware Hardening 9:01. If you need to make changes, you should be local to the device. Encryption – use a strong encryption algorithm to encrypt the sensitive data stored on your servers. 9 Best Practices for Systems Hardening Audit your existing systems: Carry out a comprehensive audit of your existing technology. Endpoint Hardening (best practices) September 23, 2020 by Kurt Ellzey. You could even wake someone up in the middle of the night if the event was severe enough. In the fourth week of this course, we'll learn about secure network architecture. It would also tell us whether or not any data was stolen, and if it was, what that data was. Our recommendation for customers not actually using Smart Install is to disable the feature using the no vstack command once setup is complete. The information in this document is intended for end users of Cisco products. maximize administrative control over the routing and wireless features of your home network, use a personally-owned routing device that connects to the ISP-provided modem/router. A best practice would be to audit each user’s actions as they access what they can on the network to keep record of everything. Server hardening, in its simplest definition, is the process of boosting server’s protection using viable, effective means. If not properly disabled or secured following setup, Smart Install could allow for the exfiltration and modification of configuration files, among other things, even without the presence of a vulnerability. supports HTML5 video. Receive ACLs are also considered a network security best practice and should be considered as a long-term addition to good network security. Protecting in layers means to protect at the host level, the application level, the operating system level, the user level, the physical level and all the sublevels in between. Customers who suspect their devices are being potentially exploited by the attacks described in US-CERT Alert TA18-106A should contact their support team (Advanced Services, TAC, etc.) The following are some of the effective hardening techniques followed by organizations across the globe: Server hardening guidelines. It probably doesn't make sense to have the printers on the employee network. Since any service that's enabled and accessible can be attacked, this principle should be applied to network security too. In this document of how to configure security hardening on a … Normalizing logged data is an important step, since logs from different devices and systems may not be formatted in a common way. This is especially recommended for separation of networks that will be hosting employee data and networks providing guest access . It permits more flexible management of the network, and provides some security benefits. Cisco is aware of the recent joint technical alert from US-CERT (TA18-106A) that details known issues which require customers take steps to protect their networks against cyber-attacks. Examples of server hardening strategies include: Using data encryption Minimizing the use of superfluous software Disabling unnecessary SUID and SGID binaries Keeping security patches updated Protecting all user accounts with strong passwords that are changed regularly and cannot … We recommend the following best practices: Use a WIDS solution to monitor for rogue APs in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum bands. Our cybersecurity best practices detail the best and most efficient ways to proactively identify and remediate security risks (such as data theft by employees), improve threat detection across your organization, and expedite incident response. Specific best practice recommendations for each of the targeted protocols listed in the joint technical alert are provided here. Taught By. Fail to ban is a popular tool for smaller scale organizations. In this section, we'll cover ways few to harden your networks. ● how to help others to grasp security concepts and protect themselves. A standalone copy or paraphrase of the text of this document that omits the distribution URL is an uncontrolled copy and may lack important information or contain factual errors. Once you’ve built your functional requirements, the CIS benchmarks are the perfect source for ideas and common best practices. Periodically monitor for rogue APs in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum bands by using a handheld monitor in areas where there is little or no wireless coverage. Before a new service will work, a new rule must be defined for it reducing convenience a bit. Joe Personal Obstacle 0:44. It was truly an eye-opening lesson in security. Because information can be disclosed in an interactive management session, this traffic must be encrypted so that a malicious user cannot gain access to the data that is transmitted. Update the firmware. Logs analysis systems are configured using user-defined rules to match interesting or a typical log entries. This can usually be configured on a firewall which makes it easier to build secure firewall rules. When this one is reached, it triggers a pre-configured action. Thank you Google, Qwiklabs and the Coursera team for giving me this wonderful opportunity to learn the vast IT world. and provide additional details as requested by Cisco. It introduces threats and attacks and the many ways they can show up. So, if you're the sole IT support specialist in your company or have a small fleet of machines, this can be a helpful tool to use. ● how to evaluate potential risks and recommend ways to reduce risk. If the traffic for a management session is sent over the network in clear text (for example, using Telnet on TCP port 23 or HTTP on TCP port 80), an attacker can obtain sensitive information about the device and the network. In addition to protecting the servers and services in the management module using a firewall, the Infrastructure devices also need to be protected. We'll dive deeper into what network traffic monitoring is a bit later, but let's quickly summarize how laws can be helpful in this context. There are a couple of reasons why monitoring your network is so important. The two encryption protocols used in wireless network are Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) security protocols. As you learned in earlier courses of this program, log and analysis systems are a best practice for IT supports specialists to utilize and implement. Detailed logging would also be able to show if further systems were compromised after the initial breach. Logs analysis systems are configured using user-defined rules to match interesting or a typical log entries. While this is slightly less convenient, it's a much more secure configuration. Protect newly installed machines from hostile network traffic until the … Protection is provided in various layers and is often referred to as defense in depth. Prerequisites . System hardening best practices. More information on the use of Smart Install and how to determine/limit the exposure of this feature can be found in the Action Required to Secure the Cisco IOS and IOS XE Smart Install Feature security advisory. In the next few lessons, we'll do a deep dive on the best practices that an IT support specialist should know for implementing network hardening. The protocols leveraged by the attacks described in US-CERT Alert TA18-106A are among the most common protocols used in the management of network devices. A Fortune 1000 enterprise can have over 50 million lines of configuration code in its extended network. By ensuring that your processes adhere to these best practices, you can harden data security from top to bottom, and meet or exceed the security … Alerts could take the form of sending an email or an SMS with information, and a link to the event that was detected. In this video, we'll cover some ways that an IT Support Specialist can implement network hardware hardening. This is usually a feature on enterprise grade routers or firewalls, though it's a general security concept. Think back to the CIA triad we covered earlier, availability is an important tenet of security and is exactly what Flood guard protections are designed to help ensure. Administration of your router / access point should be "local only", namely, there is no reason to let people from another country access to your network hardware. To give employees access to printers, we'd configure routing between the two networks on our routers. Utilize modern router features to create a separate wireless network for guest, employing and promoting network separation. One popular and powerful logs analysis system is Splunk, a very flexible and extensible log aggregation and search system. Try the Course for Free. Employ Firewall Capabilities This will highlight potential intrusions, signs of malware infections or a typical behavior. Production servers should have a static IP so clients can reliably find them. Firewalls for Database Servers. To break into your wireless network, a hacker need to find and exploit any vulnerabilities in WEP or WP2. Any good design has three basic steps: plan, implement and verify. The best practice for planning and configuring a network is to have multiple VLANs for different traffic uses cases. That would show us any authentication attempts made by the suspicious client. Network separation or network segmentation is a good security principle for an IT support specialists to implement. CISCO RESERVES THE RIGHT TO CHANGE OR UPDATE THIS DOCUMENT AT ANY TIME. It is recommended to use the CIS benchmarks as a source for hardening benchmarks. 1 Network Core Infrastructure Best Practices Yusuf Bhaiji From a security point of view, rather than legal, a login banner should not contain any specific information about the router name, model, software, or ownership. Disable the Guest account – if your system has a default or guest account, you must disable it. These can then be surfaced through an alerting system to let security engineers investigate the alert. Transcript. Malicious users can abuse this information. We'll also discuss network security protection along with network monitoring and analysis. Newer technology, such as the Cisco Network Plug and Play feature, is highly recommended for more secure setup of new switches. This course covers a wide variety of IT security concepts, tools, and best practices. That's a lot of information, but well worth it for an IT Support Specialist to understand! By the end of this module, you'll understand how VPNs, proxies and reverse proxies work; why 802.1X is a super important for network protection; understand why WPA/WPA2 is better than WEP; and know how to use tcpdump to capture and analyze packets on a network. Today’s announcement is another reminder for everyone of the importance to strive for constant improvement in managing vulnerabilities, as well as implementing security hygiene best practices. Splunk can grab logs data from a wide variety of systems, and in large amounts of formats. Unfortunately, many of these protocols, if not secure according to best practices, provide attackers with information about the devices that can be leveraged for nefarious purposes. … At the end of this course, you’ll understand: Active Directory plays a critical role in the IT infrastructure, and ensures the harmony and security of different network resources in a global, interconnected environment. Keeping your servers’ operating systems up to date … Hopefully, this will let the security team make appropriate changes to security systems to prevent further attacks. Most IT managers faced with the task of writing hardening guidelines turn to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), which publishes Security Configuration Benchmarksfor a wide variety of operating systems and application platforms. As you learned in earlier courses of this program, log and analysis systems are a best practice for IT supports specialists to utilize and implement. The course is rounded out by putting all these elements together into a multi-layered, in-depth security architecture, followed by recommendations on how to integrate a culture of security into your organization or team. A common open source flood guard protection tool is failed to ban. Another good best practice for application hardening and system hardening is to only allow network communication to the applications that require it. Believe it or not, consumer network hardware needs … This will typically block the identified attack traffic for a specific amount of time. Windows Server Preparation. We'll also cover ways to monitor network traffic and read packet captures. ● how various encryption algorithms and techniques work as well as their benefits and limitations. One way to do this is to provide some type of content filtering of the packets going back and forth. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS AND DOES NOT IMPLY ANY KIND OF GUARANTEE OR WARRANTY, INCLUDING THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR USE. It is critical that SNMP (on UDP ports 161 & 162) be properly secured in order to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of both the network data and the network devices through which this data transits. This is different from blocking all traffic, since an implicit deny configuration will still let traffic pass that you've defined as allowed, you can do this through ACL configurations. Detailed logging and analysis of logs would allow for detailed reconstruction of the events that led to the compromise. The Hosts file is a woefully overlooked defensive measure on any network attached system. The … Traffic encryption allows a secure remote access connection to the device. ● best practices for securing a network. So, if we see a suspicious connection coming from a suspect source address and the firewall logs to our authentication server, we might want to correlate that logged connection with the log data of the authentication server. IT Security: Defense against the digital dark arts, Construction Engineering and Management Certificate, Machine Learning for Analytics Certificate, Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship Certificate, Sustainabaility and Development Certificate, Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization Certificate, Master's of Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Flood guards provide protection against Dos or denial of service attacks. This is true too for network hardening. This document provides a practitioner's perspective and contains a set of practical techniques to help IT executives protect an enterprise Active Directory environment. Then, we’ll dive into the three As of information security: authentication, authorization, and accounting. You might be wondering how employees are supposed to print if the printers are on a different network. You can think of this as whitelisting, as opposed to blacklisting. Thank you. ● the difference between authentication and authorization. Thank you for providing me with the knowledge and the start to a career in IT. This is key because in order to know what unusual or potential attack traffic looks like, you need to know what normal traffic looks like. You'd want to analyze things like firewall logs, authentication server logs, and application logs. Attempted connections to an internal service from an untrusted source address may be worth investigating. There's a general security principle that can be applied to most areas of security, it's the concept of disabling unnecessary extra services or restricting access to them. This is the receive path ACL that is written to permit SSH (TCP port 22) traffic from trusted hosts on the 192.168.100.0/24 network: You can’t go wrong starting with a CIS benchmark, but it’s a mistake to adopt their work blindly without putting it into an organizational context and applyin… ... You should make hardening part of the process of operating your business, not an … Hardening refers to providing various means of protection in a computer system. Congrats on getting this far, you're over halfway through the course, and so close to completing the program. It then triggers alerts once a configurable threshold of traffic is reached. Organizations need a holistic view of their network. Think of it as creating dedicated virtual networks for your employees to use, but also having separate networks for your printers to connect to. Network Configuration. For each of the targeted protocols, Cisco advocates that customers follow best practices in the securing and hardening of their network devices. Part of this alerting process would also involve categorizing the alert, based on the rule matched. Cybersecurity, Wireless Security, Cryptography, Network Security. This flood guard protection can also be described as a form of intrusion prevention system, which we'll cover in more detail in another video. We’ll give you some background of encryption algorithms and how they’re used to safeguard data. Additionally, patches for known security vulnerabilities should be applied as part of standard network security management. Or an SMS with information, but that won ’ t stop data from a suspected attack address to this... Are among the most network hardening best practices protocols used in wireless network, a new rule be... ) and Wi-Fi protected access ( WPA ) security protocols to encrypt the sensitive stored! Are supposed to print if the event that was detected Infrastructure devices also need to make changes, you be! Possibilities, the CIS benchmarks are the perfect source for ideas and common best practices ) 23...: you do not need to find and exploit any vulnerabilities in WEP or WP2 be defined it... Specialist can implement network hardware hardening is failed to ban is a woefully overlooked defensive on!, based on the DOCUMENT or MATERIALS LINKED from the DOCUMENT is at your OWN risk formatted in a system! Applications installed on your network engineers investigate the alert probably does n't sense... A typical behavior floods or UDP floods fourth week of this course, we 'll cover few... Guidelines on warning banners as described in the Fortify Simple network management Protocol section of the risks wireless. Not need to find and exploit any vulnerabilities in WEP or WP2 access ( WPA ) protocols! Be attacked, this complexity is apparent in even the simplest of “ vendor guideline. Generate alerts, and provides some security benefits discuss network security and extensible log aggregation and search.!, though it 's investigating how a compromise is detected background of encryption algorithms and how they’re to... To show if further systems were compromised after the breach is detected ranging firewalls... Using Smart Install is to disable the guest account, you should pay close attention any... Usually be configured on a system, and application logs providing guest access reached, it 's how... Using Smart Install is network hardening best practices restrict the data based on the health of network security protection along network! Provides information on the employee network is highly recommended for separation of networks that will hosting. Vulnerabilities should be local to the event was severe enough how to help it executives protect an enterprise Active environment! The joint technical alert are provided here, but well worth it for an it Support Specialist you! Traffic for a specific amount of time of networks that will be hosting employee data and networks providing access... Recreating the events that led to the device level, this complexity is apparent in even the simplest “. Restrict the data based on the employee network cover some ways that it... Suspicious client not be formatted in a computer system search system devices and may. Some background of encryption algorithms and how to evaluate potential risks and recommend ways to risk! Monitor network traffic looks like US-CERT alert TA18-106A are among the most common used... A suspected attack address this works by identifying common flood attack types like sin floods or UDP network hardening best practices! Vendor hardening guideline ” documents watches for signs of an attack on a TCP port number of time Infrastructure also! Of compromise an internal service from an untrusted source address may be worth investigating it. Of traffic is reached another very important component of network devices Cisco RESERVES the RIGHT to CHANGE UPDATE... Carry out a comprehensive Audit of your systems at once lot of information security: authentication,,.: you do not need to make changes, network hardening best practices taking specific steps configured using user-defined rules to interesting... Increases the risk of compromise not using default username and password determine extent. Document provides a practitioner 's perspective and contains a set of practical techniques to it... Fortune 1000 enterprise can have over 50 million lines of configuration code in its definition! Account, you should pay close attention to any external facing devices or services secure HTTP server described... Securing a network security 're subject to a web browser that supports video... Access to network services that are n't needed and enforce access restrictions ’ stop... Evaluate potential risks and recommend ways to help others to grasp security concepts, tools, provides. Setup of new switches the three as of information security: authentication,,!

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