What you'll learn

Inconsistent hardening practices, excessive privileges, and weak security settings increase exposure to lateral movement, credential theft, and privilege escalation attacks while making it difficult for administrators to establish a consistent security posture. In this course, Hardening the Domain: GPO Security and CIS Benchmarks, you’ll gain the ability to implement a structured Group Policy-based hardening strategy aligned with industry security standards. First, you’ll explore security frameworks including NIST, CIS Benchmarks, and Microsoft Security Baselines to understand how organizations establish and apply security baselines for Active Directory environments. Next, you’ll discover how to deploy and customize security-focused Group Policy configurations to strengthen privileges, protect credentials, and secure administrative access based on CIS Benchmark recommendations. Finally, you’ll learn how to validate the hardened configuration, review benchmark alignment, and understand enterprise approaches for automating compliance assessments. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of Active Directory hardening and Group Policy security needed to reduce attack surface, mitigate common domain threats, and establish a resilient security foundation for enterprise Windows environments.