March 17, 2007
Lockdown Windows 2003 & XP with Simple Scripts
Now that DST 2007 is over, we are going to start a series of articles on securing systems and networks. I have built a lot of systems for various companies over the years. The challenge is to create repeatable processes that work in a variety of operating environments. Having a strong scripting toolkit can make all the difference, especially when you are under deadline.
The first script in the series is a Windows Services lockdown script for Windows XP & 2003. Disabling services is generally a good idea to reduce the threat profile of your computer, and to improve its performance. Every security guide out there tells you to disable unnecessary services. A few of them also give some guidance as to which services are unnecessary. Few of them tell you how to disable them consistently.
There are three ways to disable services: 1) Use the Services MMC GUI. This is a time consuming process and is prone to mistakes. 2) Use Group Policy. This works well for environments that use Group Policy, but is harder to implement for stand-alone servers, such as web servers. 3) Use the sc.exe command line utility.
If you do not know the sc command, learn it! sc is a powerful utility for controlling services on local or remote hosts. sc will let you configure how services start, change the user account and password they run under, and start/stop/pause the services. The basic syntax of sc is:
sc <server> [command] [service name] <option1> <option2>
We are going to use 2 different sc commands in our service lockdown script: config & stop. These should be self explanatory, but config will allow us to disable the service, and stop will stop the service. To make this work, we need three files: 1) The script batch file; 2) a list of servers by name called hosts.txt; 3) a list of services we want to disable called services.txt. The two text files must be in the same directory as the batch file. The code is fairly simple: (read more…)
