The following excerpt series from Chapter 5 of "Microsoft Windows Group Policy Guide" by William R. Stanek, Darren Mar-Elia and Derek Melber is provided by Microsoft Press, copyright 2005. Click here to purchase the book.

Chapter 5: Hardening Clients and Servers

This chapter discusses the philosophy behind protecting clients and servers in the Active Directory domain and the methods and tools for doing so. We will investigate security templates, which are the main mechanism used to configure security on computers running Microsoft Windows. We will look at the uses and roles of the default security templates, as well as how to create, import, change, export, and apply security templates. We will examine the various sections of a security template, along with the key settings in each section.

We will also look at the Security Configuration Wizard, a new tool in Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Service Pack 1. The wizard works in conjunction with your security templates, but it also incorporates "role-based" security and application security. The wizard generates security policies, which can include security template settings. We will look at how to deploy security templates and security policies to ensure secure clients and servers, and we will investigate using the new Security Configuration Wizard to harden clients and servers.

Chapter 5 excerpts:

1. Understanding security templates
2. Deploying security templates
3. General hardening techniques
4. Server hardening
5. Client hardening
6. Troubleshooting security settings

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