Endpoint hardening is a security practice that helps organizations minimize the attack surface of endpoints by ensuring they are correctly configured, patched, and secured. This security practice strengthens your endpoints to be more resistant to malicious activities. Endpoint hardening involves securing hardware, applications, operating systems, and network devices.

As cyberattacks are more prevalent and sophisticated, cyber security has become a priority for organizations to secure and strengthen their endpoints to prevent them. These attacks are more likely to be successful against unpatched and misconfigured endpoints.

Endpoints are physical or virtual devices that connect to a network. They can be workstations, servers, network devices, etc. Most of these devices come with minimal security configurations out of the box, allowing threat actors to conduct successful cyberattacks. This condition makes endpoint hardening vital to an organization’s security.

Issues that affect endpoint security

To ensure the security of your corporate networks, you must verify that your endpoints are properly configured and updated with the latest patches. This can be challenging due to the wide range of issues that can impact endpoint security. We have grouped some of these issues into the following categories:

• Misconfigurations: These occur when security settings are not adequately defined or maintained during the configuration process. Misconfigurations can be introduced to an organization’s infrastructure when you add new IT assets, system changes occur, or patches are applied. Typical misconfigurations in endpoints include default and hardcoded passwords, usernames or logins, unnecessary software and services, and deprecated protocols.
• Vulnerabilities and unpatched software: A vulnerability is a weakness in an endpoint that threat actors can exploit to gain unauthorized access. Vulnerabilities can come from outdated or unpatched software, insecure designs, broken access controls, and authentication failures.
• Malware threats: Threat actors develop new ways to gain access, steal information, or manipulate users into giving out sensitive information. One of these ways includes malware, which is malicious software designed to gain unauthorized access to data or cause disruption of services running on endpoints. Malware types include computer viruses, ransomware, spyware, trojan viruses, and adware.

Benefits of endpoint hardening

Endpoint hardening is vital for organization security for several reasons, including:

• The security of hardened endpoints is enhanced and less susceptible to compromise due to the reduced number of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
• The performance and reliability of hardened endpoints are enhanced as irrelevant services and software that slow their operation are either stopped or removed. This lowers the risk of misconfiguration.
• Endpoint hardening helps to meet regulatory compliance and pass auditing exercises.
• Endpoint hardening can help avoid the costly and adverse consequences of security incidents.

The need to simplify the endpoint hardening process

Endpoint hardening is resource-intensive and time-consuming. It requires understanding the different techniques through which threat actors can gain unauthorized access to an endpoint. Fortunately, compliance frameworks and best practices like CIS benchmarks, NIST, and PCI-DSS provide information on reducing the attack surface. Additionally, organizations can detect vulnerabilities through penetration testing and vulnerability scanners.

However, these mechanisms require human intervention for proper functioning. Vulnerabilities are discovered almost daily, and system administrators can inadvertently misconfigure their endpoints, exposing them to compromise. Hardening must be a continuous and automated process to stay ahead of data breaches.

Wazuh for endpoint hardening

Wazuh is a free, open-source security platform that offers Unified SIEM and XDR capabilities, providing security across workloads on cloud and on-premises environments. Its architecture comprises a server, indexer, dashboard, and multiplatform agents. The Wazuh agents are deployed on endpoints to collect and forward security events to the Wazuh server.

Wazuh offers a centralized view for monitoring, detecting, and alerting security events and incidents of monitored endpoints. It ingests and correlates events from third-party applications and network devices for advanced threat detection and automated response to security incidents.

We discuss some of the capabilities of Wazuh for endpoint hardening in the sections below.

Configuration assessment and compliance

This involves a comprehensive analysis of security issues on endpoints based on compliance standards to improve security posture. You should perform configuration assessments regularly to identify and remediate potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on endpoints.

The Wazuh platform has a Security Configuration Assessment (SCA) module that provides optimized, well-defined, and updated controls or policies that meet regulatory compliance standards for endpoint hardening. These pre-defined controls meet the HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53 compliance standards, and CIS benchmarks. The module is robust and performant, with an easy-to-use dashboard.

The SCA module performs scheduled scans to discover exposures or misconfigurations in monitored endpoints continuously. Its flexibility allows you to write custom policies or extend existing ones to meet your organization’s needs. The module works on all Wazuh-supported platforms, including Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.

SCA scan results contain detailed analysis findings evaluated on endpoints, including information such as a rationale, remediation, and description of the check, as shown in figure 1 below:

Vulnerability assessment and patch management

Vulnerability management is a continuous process of identifying, classifying, remediating, and mitigating security vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management includes vulnerability detection, vulnerability assessment, and remediation.

Wazuh provides a Vulnerability Detector module that streamlines and accelerates the discovery of vulnerabilities in operating systems and applications installed on monitored endpoints. It audits software to detect vulnerabilities by leveraging publicly available vulnerability feeds indexed by Canonical, Debian, Red Hat, Arch Linux, Amazon Linux Advisories Security (ALAS), Microsoft, and the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Wazuh cross-correlates these feeds with software inventory data of monitored endpoints for extensive vulnerability detection.

With this information, system administrators can now assess the vulnerabilities and run the necessary actions to patch them.

Threat detection and automated response

Threat detection involves identifying threats in an organization’s endpoints or other IT assets. The active response module mitigates threats to halt the impact of security breaches.

Wazuh agents collect and forward security events to the Wazuh server for malware and anomaly detection. In addition, it is flexible and integrates with external security software to extend its threat-detection capability.

The active response module of Wazuh provides countermeasures that you can configure  to respond to security incidents based on specified criteria automatically. The Wazuh active response module removes malware, blocks malicious IP addresses, and disables accounts, amongst other actions. You can also configure it to execute custom scripts for your scenario.

Key takeaways

Data breaches are significantly increasing due to expanding attack surfaces, monetary gains, and geographical conflicts. Organizations must implement automated systems that provide security weaknesses and remediation information for endpoint hardening. In this sense, security experts can harden their endpoints with this information to effectively and continuously prevent cyberattacks.

Wazuh is a free, open-source SIEM and XDR solution for organization security. Wazuh integrates with several third-party technologies to extend its detection capabilities. The Wazuh Security Configuration Assessment, Vulnerability Detector, and active response modules make the solution robust for endpoint hardening.

With over 10 million annual downloads and a fast-growing open-source community, Wazuh provides extensive support to users.