System Hardening Basics

Summary

Reducing a system's attack surface — disabling unnecessary services, applying patches, enforcing strong configurations — following established baselines (like CIS Benchmarks) rather than guessing.

• 1Apply a basic hardening checklist to a practice VM (disable unused services, enforce strong passwords).
• 2Explore a CIS Benchmark document for a specific OS at a high level.
• 3Learn why hardening reduces risk even without eliminating every possible vulnerability.