Top Ten Recommendations to Enhance Windows Operating System Security (1)

Regardless of the operating system you are using now, there are always some general recommendations for enhancing system security. If you want to harden your system to prevent unauthorized access and unfortunate disasters, the following precautions will definitely help you.

1. Use a password with a high security factor

One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve security is to use a password that is not easily guessed by brute force attacks.

What is a violent attack? The attacker uses an automated system to guess the password as quickly as possible, in the hope that the correct password will be discovered soon. Use special characters and spaces, use uppercase and lowercase letters, avoid using words that can be found in the dictionary, and don't use pure numeric passwords. This password is more difficult to crack than using your mother's name or your birthday as a password. .

In addition, you have to remember that each time you increase the length of your password by one, you will increase the combination of your password characters in multiples. In half, passwords smaller than 8 characters are considered to be easily cracked. You can use 10 or 12 characters as the password, and 16 is of course better. It's safer to keep your password as long as possible without being too long to type.

2, do border protection

Not all security issues occur on the system desktop. It's a good idea to use an external firewall/router to help protect your computer, even if you only have one computer.

If you think about it from a low level, you can buy a broadband router device, such as Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear routers that you can buy online. If you're thinking about high-end, you can use security devices such as managed switches, routers, and firewalls from enterprise vendors such as Cisco and Foundry. Of course, you can also use your pre-packaged firewall/router installer to build your own protection devices, such as m0n0wall and IPCoP. Proxy servers, anti-virus gateways, and spam filtering gateways all contribute to very strong perimeter security.

Keep in mind that, in general, in terms of security, managed switches are stronger than hubs, and routers with address translation are better than switches, and hardware firewalls are the first choice.

3, upgrade your software

In many cases, before installing and deploying production applications, patch testing of the system is crucial, the final security patch must be installed In your system. If you do not perform a security upgrade for a long time, it may cause your computer to be easily targeted by unscrupulous hackers. Therefore, do not install the software on a computer that has not been updated for a long time.

The same applies to any signature-based malware protection tool, such as an anti-virus application. If it is not updated in time, the current malware feature definition cannot be obtained, and the protection effect will be large. discount.

4, shut down unused services

In most cases, many computer users do not even know what services they can access through the network on their systems, this is a very dangerous situation .

Telnet and FTP are two common problem services. If your computer does not need to run them, please close them immediately. Make sure you understand exactly what each service running on your computer does, and know why it is running.

In some cases, this may require you to understand which services are important to you so that you don't make mistakes such as shutting down RPC services on a Microsoft Windows computer. However, it is always a good idea to turn off services that you don't actually use.