Hardening Operating Systems
Tarrence Ohale
Bryant & Stratton College
SECR210JJ1
Mr. D. Bouvin
February 21, 2013

Hardening Operating Systems
When hardening an operating system one of the first things you should do is establish a baseline and have a traffic monitoring system to watch network traffic. Baseline is to find the standards for your network and can help you figure quickly what is out of the ordinary in terms of traffic for your network.
Having a baseline established is great to identify malicious behavior and helps you react quicker in defense of a possible zero day attack or DoS attack. Another important step when hardening is to close ports not being used. This will prevent unessential ports to be used as a back door to your data. It is very important to make sure your operating system stays up to date this is because new malware and spyware are discovered constantly and if you are not up to date your systems can get infected (Techotopia, 2009).
Also it is good for the team, including the administrator to have strong passwords. Nothing that is easily guessable such as a birthday or name of spouse. It should have a deep combination of letters, numbers, symbols, lower case and upper case. Any unnecessary accounts such as guess accounts should be eliminated. Make sure you are using the Access Control List (ACLs) and file permissions, all files and directories need to be controlled from this (Techotopia, 2009).
A few extra things you can do in defense of your Network and data you can set up a DMZ or Demilitarized zone this way you can put information out to the internet such as a web page and people from the outside can look at the web page but only information that you allow them to see through the DMZ can be seen. Another awesome thing is a Honeypot and this is something you can set up to trick script kiddies you put this up to trick them