Implementing Proactive Windows Security

Course Overview
Hello everyone, my name is Sami Laiho, welcome to my course, Implementing Proactive Windows Security. I'm a senior technical fellow at my own company called Adminize. Security's always a compromise between security, usability, and cost. You can always get two, but never three. In the future, the only way to secure Windows environments is to implement proactive security and forget about trusting only reactive solutions like anti-malware. This course takes you through needed to sign and implementation considerations, while moving your company from reactive to proactive security. Some of the major topics that we will cover include what level of BitLocker security is really worth it, how do you really get rid of admin rights, and why IPsec is not as bad as people make it sound like. By the end of this course, you'll know how to design and implement proactive security in a Windows network. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar with the basics of Windows operating systems.

Increasing Security and Performance by Limiting Privileges
In this module, we're going to talk about the second most important thing with security, which is to implement the principle of least privilege. In the previous module, we already discussed about the immutable laws of security, and one of them being that we have to implement the principle of least privilege. By implementing the principle of least privilege, we can make sure that no one will break the second rule, which is to implement the hard disk encryption. There are many reasons why we want to limit the use of high-privileged accounts. First of all, it's security. The only way to prevent installation of malicious software is sadly, to prevent installation of legal and good software as well. Many people tell me that I'm doing a negative thing by taking away something from them. It's not just a security issue, but it is actually also good for your computer, and I'm trying to make your computer work and perform better. The more rights you have, the more garbage you can write to your disk. I'm going to show you this in a demo in a short while. Group policy is a cool thing to manage computers, but the thing is that if you have group policy settings, but you have admin rights at the same time, the admin can always remove your group policies. So to keep compliance, you cannot allow users to be running admin. Since the beginning of NT, back in 1993 starting with NT 3. 1, there has been this base rule that you cannot have admin rights on your computers if you want to have any kind of security. Next we're going to take a look at how these admin rights affect your computer, and how they actually make them perform worse.