Protect Your Windows Network: From Perimeter to Data

Praise for Protect Your Windows Network

"Jesper and Steve have done an outstanding job of covering the myriad of issues you must deal with to implement an effective network security policy. If you care about security this book is a must have."
—Mark Russinovich, Chief Software Architect, Winternals Software

"Johansson and Riley's new book presents complex issues in straightforward language, examining both the technical and business aspects of network security. As a result, this book is an important tutorial for those responsible for network security; and even non-technical business leaders would learn a lot about how to manage the business risk inherent in their dependence on information technology.
—Scott Charney, Vice President of Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft

"These guys have a profound understanding of what it takes to implement secure solutions in the real world! Jesper and Steve have been doing security related work (pen testing, consulting, program management, etc.) internally at Microsoft and for Microsoft's customers for many years. As a result of their real-world experience, they understand that security threats don't confine themselves to "the network" or "the operating system" and that to deliver secure solutions, these issues must be tackled at all levels after all of the threats to the environment have been identified. This book distinguishes itself from others in this field in that it does a great job of explaining the threats at many levels (network, operating system, data, and application) and how to counter these threats. A must read for security practitioners!"
—Robert Hensing, CISSP, Security Software Engineer—Security Business and Technology Unit, Microsoft Corporation, rhensing@microsoft.com

"A good book should make you think. A good computer book should make you change how you are doing things in your network. I was fortunate enough to be setting up a new server as I read the book and incorporated many of the items discussed. The lessons in these chapters have relevance to networks large and small and blow through many of the myths surrounding computer security and guide you in making smarter security decisions. Too many times people focus in on just one aspect or part of a network's security and don't look at the bigger picture. These days I'm doing my very best to keep in mind the bigger picture of the forest (active directory notwithstanding), and not just looking at those trees."
—Susan Bradley, CPA, GSEC, MCP, Small Business Server MVP, http://www.msmvps.com/Bradley, sbradcpa@pacbell.net

"Jesper Johansson and Steve Riley's Protect Your Windows Network is a must read for all organizations to gain practical insight and best practices to improve their overall security posture."
—Jon R. Wall, CISSP

"Jesper and Steve are two excellent communicators who really know their stuff! If you want to learn more about how to protect yourself and your network, read this book and learn from these two guys!"
—Richard Waymire

"In order to protect your particular Windows network you need to understand how Windows security mechanisms really work. Protect Your Windows Network gives you an in-depth understanding of Windows security so that you use the security techniques that best map to your needs."
—Chris Wysopal, Director, Development, Symantec Corporation, http://www.symantec.com

"Nowadays, a computer that is not connected to a network is fairly limited in its usefulness. At the same time, however, a networked computer is a prime target for criminals looking to take advantage of you and your systems. In this book, Jesper and Steve masterfully demonstrate the whys and hows of protecting and defending your network and its resources, providing invaluable insight and guidance that will help you to ensure your assets are more secure."
—Stephen Toub, Technical Editor, MSDN Magazine, stoub@microsoft.com

"Security is more than knobs and switches. It is a mind set. Jesper Johansson and Steve Riley clearly understand this. Protect Your Windows Network is a great book on how you can apply this mind set to people, process, and technology to build and maintain more secure networks. This book is a must read for anyone responsible for protecting their organization's network."
—Ben Smith, Senior Security Strategist, Microsoft Corporation, Author of Microsoft Windows Security Resource Kit 2 and Assessing Network Security

"Security is finally getting the mainstream exposure that it has always deserved; Johansson and Riley's book is a fine guide that can complement Microsoft's recent focus on security in the Windows-family operating systems."
—Kenneth Wehr, President, ColumbusFreenet.org

"If you have not been able to attend one of the many security conferences around the world that Jesper and Steve presented, this book is the next best thing. They are two of the most popular speakers at Microsoft on Windows security. This is an informative book on how to make your Windows network more secure. Understanding the trade-offs between high security and functionality is a key concept that all Windows users should understand. If you're responsible for network security or an application developer, this book is a must."
—Kevin McDonnell, Microsoft

In this book, two senior members of Microsoft's Security Business and Technology Unit present a complete "Defense in Depth" model for protecting any Windows network—no matter how large or complex. Drawing on their work with hundreds of enterprise customers, they systematically address all three elements of a successful security program: people, processes, and technology.

Unlike security books that focus on individual attacks and countermeasures, this book shows how to address the problem holistically and in its entirety. Through hands-on examples and practical case studies, you will learn how to integrate multiple defenses—deterring attacks, delaying them, and increasing the cost to the attacker. Coverage includes

• Improving security from the top of the network stack to the bottom

• Understanding what you need to do right away and what can wait

• Avoiding "pseudo-solutions" that offer a false sense of security

• Developing effective security policies—and educating those pesky users

• Beefing up your first line of defense: physical and perimeter security

• Modeling threats and identifying security dependencies

• Preventing rogue access from inside the network

• Systematically hardening Windows servers and clients

• Protecting client applications, server applications, and Web services

• Addressing the unique challenges of small business network security

Authoritative and thorough, Protect Your Windows Network will be the standard Microsoft security guide for sysadmins, netadmins, security professionals, architects, and technical decision-makers alike.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Online Sample Chapters

Anatomy Of A Hack—The Rise And Fall Of Your Network

The Fundamental Reasons for Protecting Your Windows Network

Sample Chapter(s)

Download the Sample Chapter related to this title.

Index

Download the Index file related to this title.

Preface

More than a year ago now, I (Jesper) decided that I was finally going to write a book on security. Partially it was because I was getting tired of answering the same questions over and over again, partially because I thought I had something unique to say, and partially because I am hoping to buy a small boat with the proceeds.

After writing the outline and the first chapter, I decided that I needed a co-author to help out, particularly because I simply do not know nearly as much as I would like about certain topics. Because Steve had already had his own thoughts about writing a book, this was a great match. Steve is a perfect complement in the sense that both of us started the same way, in networking, but unlike myself, who went into IT so I could avoid having to deal with people, Steve is actually an extrovert who loves to figure out how to protect people from people. Of course, both of us enjoy debating controversial opinions, mostly just for the thrill of the argument. Working together, the book slowly started to take shape.

The book is focused around the defense-in-depth model we helped develop and refine in our work at Microsoft, and it gives a logical flow to the book that helps in building an overall security strategy, something both of us believed was lacking in the current literature. You get only so much security if you concentrate solely on the technology; the people and the processes are equally important. Indeed, without thought in those two areas, most of the technology you deploy to protect information systems will fail to do what you intend—it will only give you a false sense of security, which in fact can be more dangerous than no security at all.

Much of what you see in these pages has been said before, in various presentations. Both of us travel the world to deliver speeches on security, and if you have ever heard us you will no doubt recognize some of the things you will read in these pages. In a sense, the book is the lecture notes everyone who has heard our presentations keeps asking for. Of course, those notes are sorely needed because most of our presentations are increasingly light on slides to avoid that all-too-common malady: death by PowerPoint.

Everyone we know who has written a book always says in the foreword that their first book is one they wanted to write for a long time. (We are now wondering what's left for us to write in our second book.) That is good, because it takes a long time to write a book. Neither of us thought that we had the competency to write one until recently, so it is not really true that we have wanted to write it for a long time. We have certainly thought about security for a long time, though, and you could certainly say that we wanted to learn enough about it for a long time to have something meaningful to say. After we had spent a few years talking to people, it was clear that security is an area that is fraught with misunderstandings (as we see them) and snake oil (pseudo-solutions that do not do what they purport to do at best, and are harmful at worst).

We find this type of "security theater" all around us. Consider, for instance, next time you go through an airport security check, who would be capable of causing more damage: a 92-year-old great-grandmother with a pair of cuticle scissors, or a 22-year-old martial arts black belt? They will confiscate the cuticle scissors, but they will allow the martial arts champion on the plane without putting him in shackles first. Some secure facilities will confiscate USB drives (and GPS receivers—why in the world?) "for security reasons," but they allow 80 GB FireWire (i1394) drives through because the security personnel cannot imagine any "threats" associated with digital music players. Many organizations have a password policy that requires users to use passwords too long and complicated to remember (and then routinely complain about the expense of resetting locked-out accounts), they block any kind of information gathering from ancient operating systems, and they do it all on computers that have not been patched for more than a year! It may appear that they are providing security but in reality this is nothing more than security theater.

We finally decided that the right way to dispel these myths was to write a book. At the time, it seemed like a really good idea, and we are sure that at some point it will seem like a good idea again.

Security in information technology is an evolving field; so evolving, in fact, that there is not really a clear name for it. Some people, ourselves included sometimes, call it information security (infosec). We like that term, because protecting information is the ultimate goal. However, it is also important to protect the data before it becomes information, and it is important to protect the resources and functionality provided by the systems in the network, and infosec does not capture that very well. Computer security gives us a connotation of protecting a single computer, and single computers simply are not that interesting today. Others call the field distributed systems security. However, as we explain in Chapter 1, "Introduction to Network Protection," we think distributed systems is a terrible idea from a security perspective and we want to avoid that term. Thus, we stuck with network security, which means protecting all the assets in the network.

Just as with the name of the field, many other issues are up for debate in network security. Therefore, what you will find in these pages is often our opinion of what is correct. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Chapter 12, "Server and Client Hardening," but you will find the same phenomenon elsewhere. You may already have an opinion that is not the same as ours, or you may not. The point is not so much to persuade you that our opinion is correct as it is to make you think about the whole picture. If you do that, and come to a conclusion that is different from ours, then our objective has been met. We simply are trying to make you challenge the perceived (often outdated) wisdom and form a conclusion that helps you better protect your network.

What Is on the CD
The CD has a few tools that we wrote, partially because we needed a break from writing chapters, and partially because we thought they would be fun to write. Hopefully you will find some of these useful:

• A HOSTS file a friend of ours gave us to black hole many spyware sites. It simply maps all their DNS names to localhost thus preventing the machine from accessing them. Just copy it into %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc to use it. You can get an even bigger one at http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002, and we recommend you update your HOSTS file from there every week or so.

• A password generator. Passgen is an enterprise-class, command- line password manager. We discuss it more in Chapter 11, "Passwords and Other Authentication Mechanisms—The Last Line of Defense," and Chapter 8, "Security Dependencies." Also look at the readme for more information.

• An SQL script to revoke all permissions from the public login. Use with care, but it is fun to see how much public has access to. You use it by pasting it into a Query Analyzer window. It will generate another query as output. If you copy and paste the output into another Query Analyzer window and run it, all the public permissions are revoked.

• A slipstreaming tool. Like passgen, it is another custom tool developed specifically for the book. This VBScript is used to create on-disk operating system installations that already have all the patches applied—which turns out to be an involved process if you do it by hand. Instead, run the slipstream script, tell it where the source files are, where the patches are, and which service pack and operating system you are building; it will automatically build an on-disk install that has all the patches. We wrote this in VBScript because we figured it would be small and short. 1,100 lines of code later, we simply were not interested in rewriting it in a cooler and more efficient language.

We hope you will find these tools useful. They are licensed for your use within the organization that pays for the book. Please respect intellectual property rights and do not spread them around. Likewise, if you receive a copy of one of these tools from somewhere other than the CD, do not run it until you verify its authenticity. The SHA-1 hash of the slipstream tool is ddcf0bbaa4f09319f0d804df79ae60692748dbc9, and the one of the passgen tool is a10baed3102b2183569077a3fbe18113a658ed5d. If you get a copy of either tool with a different SHA-1 hash, do not use it! Instead, send us an e-mail at ProtectYourNetwork@hotmail.com, and we will get you a legitimate copy.

Acknowledgments
Once we had all the material, the drive, the marital buy-off, and all the other pieces for the book together, we were still missing one thing: a publisher. Karen Gettman at Addison-Wesley has seen us speak numerous times and has bugged us for a couple years to write for her; we are immensely indebted to her for giving us a chance and for letting us have almost unlimited artistic license in what we were doing.

We are also extremely grateful to our reviewers, particularly Susan Bradley, one of the sharpest and most vocal MVPs Microsoft has. As Michael Howard once noted about Jesper in the introduction to the first edition of Writing Secure Code, Susan read every single word, sentence, chapter, and paragraph, and had comments on every single word, sentence, chapter, and paragraph—and plenty of comments about things not in the book as well. If the book makes sense to system administrators in small businesses, it is entirely because of Susan. If it does not, it is our fault. We also had great feedback from our other reviewers, including, Corey Hynes, Richard Waymire, Gene Schultz, Marcus Murray, Mark Russinovich, Matt Bishop, Michael Howard, Rob Hensing, Brian Komar, David LeBlanc, Ben Smith, Jon Wall, Chris Wysopal, Kevin McDonnell, Michael Angelo, Byron Hynes, Harlan Carvey, Russ Rogers, James Morris, Robert Shimonski, Kurt Dillard, Rick Kingslan, Phil Cox, and James Edelen.

Last, but certainly not least, we are indebted (forever, in an irreparable sort of way) to our lovely wives Jennifer and Ingrid. Not only did they let us get away with writing the book, but also with traveling around the world talking to people, which both of us enjoy tremendously.

We hope to see you soon at an event near you!

—Jesper and Steve

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.

About the Authors.

Preface.

I. INTRODUCTION AND FUNDAMENTALS.

1. Introduction to Network Protection.

    Why Would Someone Attack Me?

    Nobody Will Ever Call You to Tell You How Well the Network Is Working

    Introduction to the Defense-in-Depth Model

    The Defender's Dilemma

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

2. Anatomy of a Hack-The Rise and Fall of Your Network.

    What a Penetration Test Will Not Tell You

    Why You Need To Understand Hacking

    Target Network

    Network Footprinting

    Initial Compromise

    Elevating Privileges

    Hacking Other Machines

    Taking Over the Domain

    Post-mortem

    How to Get an Attacker Out of Your Network

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

3. Rule Number 1: Patch Your Systems.

    Patches Are a Fact of Life

    Exercise Good Judgment

    What Is a Patch?

    Patch Management Is Risk Management

    Tools to Manage Security Updates

    Advanced Tips and Tricks

    Slipstreaming

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

II. POLICIES, PROCEDURES, AND USER AWARENESS.

4. Developing Security Policies.

    Who Owns Developing Security Policy

    What a Security Policy Looks Like

    Why a Security Policy Is Necessary

    Why So Many Security Policies Fail

    Analyzing Your Security Needs to Develop _Appropriate Policies

    How to Make Users Aware of Security Policies

    Procedures to Enforce Policies

    Dealing with Breaches of Policy

    More Information

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

5. Educating Those Pesky Users.

    System Administration ? Security Administration

    Securing People

    The Problem

    Protecting People

    Plausibility + Dread + Novelty = Compromise

    Things You Should Do Today

III. PHYSICAL AND PERIMETER SECURITY: THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE.

6. If You Do Not Have Physical Security, You Do Not Have Security.

    But First, a Story

    It's a Fundamental Law of Computer Security

    The Importance of Physical Access Controls

    Protecting Client PCs

    The Case of the Stolen Laptop

    The Family PC

    No Security, Physical or Otherwise, Is Completely Foolproof

    Things You Should Do Today

7. Protecting Your Perimeter.

    The Objectives of Information Security

    The Role of the Network

    Start with (What's Left of) Your Border

    Next, Use the Right Firewall

    Then, Consider Your Remote Access Needs

    Finally, Start Thinking About "Deperimeterization"

    Things You Should Do Today

IV. PROTECTING YOUR NETWORK INSIDE THE PERIMETER.

8. Security Dependencies.

    Introduction to Security Dependencies

    Administrative Security Dependencies

    Service Account Dependencies

    Mitigating Service and Administrative Dependencies

    Other Security Dependencies

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

9. Network Threat Modeling.

    Network Threat Modeling Process

    Document Your Network

    Segment Your Network

    Restrict Access to Your Network

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

10. Preventing Rogue Access Inside the Network.

    The Myth of Network Sniffing

    Network Protection at Layers 2 and 3

    Using 802.1X for Network Protection

    Using IPsec for Network Protection

    Network Quarantine Systems

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

11. Passwords and Other Authentication Mechanisms-The Last Line of Defense.

    Introduction

    Password Basics

    Password History

    What Administrators Need to Know About Passwords

    Password Best Practices

    Recommended Password Policy

    Better Than Best Practices-Multifactor Authentication

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

V. PROTECTING HOSTS.

12. Server and Client Hardening.

    Security Configuration Myths

    On to the Tweaks

    Top 10 (or so) Server Security Tweaks

    Top 10 (or so) Client Security Tweaks

    The Caution List-Changes You Should Not Make

    Security Configuration Tools

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

VI. PROTECTING APPLICATIONS.

13. Protecting User Applications.

    Patch Them!

    Make Them Run As a Nonadmin

    Turn Off Functionality

    Restrict Browser Functionality

    Attachment Manager

    Spyware

    Security Between Chair and Keyboard (SeBCAK)

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

14. Protecting Services and Server Applications.

    You Need a Healthy Disrespect for Your Computer

    Rule 1: All Samples Are Evil

    Three Steps to Lowering the Attack Surface

    What About Service Accounts?

    Privileges Your Services Do Not Need

    Hardening SQL Server 2000

    Hardening IIS 5.0 and 6.0

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

15. Security for Small Businesses.

    Protect Your Desktops and Laptops

    Protect Your Servers

    Protect Your Network

    Keep Your Data Safe

    Use the Internet Safely

    Small Business Security Is No Different, Really

    What You Should Do Today

16. Evaluating Application Security.

    Caution: More Software May Be Hazardous to Your Network Health

    Baseline the System

    Things to Watch Out For

    Summary

    What You Should Do Today

VII. PROTECTING DATA.

17. Data-Protection Mechanisms.

    Security Group Review

    Access Control Lists

    Layers of Access Control

    Access Control Best Practices

    Rights Management Systems

    Incorporating Data Protection into Your Applications

    Protected Data: Our Real Goal

    What You Should Do Today

Appendix A: How to Get Your Network Hacked in 10 Easy Steps.

Appendix B: Script To Revoke SQL Server PUBLIC Permissions.

Appendix C. HOSTS file to Block Spyware.

Appendix D. Password Generator Tool.

    -g (Generate Password Based on Known Input)

    -r (Generate Random Password)

    -s (Set a Password on an Account and/or Service)

    Security Information

    Usage Scenarios

Appendix E: 10 Immutable Laws of Security.

    Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

    Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

    Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

    Law #4: -If you allow a bad guy to upload programs to your Web site, it's not your Web site any more.

    Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security.

    Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.     Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key.

    Law #8: An out-of-date virus scanner is only marginally better than no virus scanner at all.

    Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practical, in real life or on the Web.     Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

Index.