Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks for OS Security

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense.” It is a collaborative effort by security and computing experts from governments, universities, and the private sector. The center develops security benchmarks and best practices with broad applicability, using a consensus model.

A CIS benchmark serves as a configuration baseline and also as the best practice for securely configuring systems. A benchmark consists of multiple recommendations, each consisting of one or more controls that can be implemented by organizations to improve security for a certain computing system. The recommendations and controls are mapped to compliance standards including ISO 27000, PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST CSF, and NIST SP 800-53.

For operating systems, CIS provides a series of benchmarks that cover secure configuration, with a dedicated benchmark for all major versions of all popular operating systems – including Windows, Windows Server, OS X, and all common Linux distributions.

CIS also offers pre-configured and hardened OS images, which you can access via major cloud providers. Hardened Images are pre-configured with security best practices, and greatly limit security vulnerabilities that may lead to network attacks.

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Safeguarding IT systems against cyber threats would take lots of time and required many meetings between IT and Security to debate which configuration settings.

Center For information security(CIS) has developed CIS Benchmarks for operating systems and cloud platforms. But applying them to individual systems and auditing their current state is impracticable.

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Relevant Blogs: 

System Hardening: An Easy-to-Understand Overview

Types of system hardening

What is some system hardening standards

OS Hardening: 10 Best Practices