Best Practices for a Bullet-Proof Endpoint Configuration Audit

In today’s complex digital landscape, the importance of configuration security audits cannot be overstated.This guide breaks down the essential steps for mastering your configuration security audits, ensuring you can identify and address misconfigurations effectively. By following these steps, you’ll not only safeguard your critical assets but also build a culture of accountability, keen attention-to-detail, and continuous improvement.

Having said that, it's far from an easy process and can be daunting for some. Here, we’ve endeavored to create a sort of cheat sheet to help simplify the process. 

Step 1: Define the Scope of the Audit

To start, you’ll need to decide what you’ll be assessing. As a general rule, you’ll want to pay special attention to your critical assets and known weak spots maintaining a clear line of sight over those risk groups throughout the process.

Critical assets

The heart of your organization, these are the systems and devices your business can't function without. Think of servers that support your business and its data, or the network infrastructure that enables communication, or the workstations that keep productivity flowing.

Weak spots

These are the parts of your network known to be liabilities in terms of security. It could be devices running deprecated software or a group of printers that are vulnerable to Print Nightmare. Or it could be a fleet of IoT devices that were deployed without or with less rigorous security procedures, as is often the case.

Wherever they may be, your weak spots are the most likely to offer bad actors an entry point into your organization. The 2016 Mirai botnet attack provides a poignant example, when hackers exploited poorly secured IoT devices like mart home hubs with weak default passwords to carry out a massive DDoS attack that disrupted major sites like Twitter and Spotify.

Audits are conducted in order to prevent such events and its with that in mind that it's so important you prepare your audit and its scope with a keen awareness of and special attention paid to your weak spots.

If you don't already have a good handle on your weak points, consider running some penetration tests to simulate real-world attacks. This will help identify weak points in your network and confirm whether certain misconfigurations can be exploited by attackers.

Step 2: Define What Constitutes a Misconfiguration for You

Now that you know what you’re looking at, you’ll need to know what you’re looking for. Misconfigurations are not universal; they’re subjective and can vary from business to business. Determine what undesirable configurations pose the greatest threat to your organization. Default credentials, open ports, and improper access controls might be high on your list.

The question of what you consider an auditable misconfiguration often boils down to another somewhat simpler question: what do you consider acceptable risk? 

Risk acceptance involves the acknowledgment that not all risks discovered need immediate remediation. Factors such as the likelihood of exploitation, potential damage, regulatory consequences, and business continuity should be considered. By choosing to operate with specific risks, an organization can better focus their energies on areas of higher priority and bigger impact. 

Importantly though, this requires continuous monitoring and reassessment, as what is deemed acceptable can shift with evolving threats, regulatory demands, and changes in business priorities​. To state the obvious: it’s a risky business. Miscalculations are common as organizations underestimate risk and overestimate their ability to manage it. 

Our advice when determining what you consider acceptable risk is to be very careful and generally conservative.

Step 3: Gather Configuration Data

Next, you’ll need to collect information. It can come from logs, configuration files, or network monitoring tools. How you get the information doesn’t really matter, provided you’re getting it all and you’re getting it accurately. Of course, the how of the matter will have a big impact on the amount of time and energy it takes.  

Ultimately, the goal is not only to see where you have risky configurations, but also to see where your existing policies might be unfit for purpose or improperly enforced. As such, a rigorous search is crucial to the efficacy of your audit.

The more comprehensive your data, the more effective your configuration security audit will be.

The manual approach

If you decide to gather information the old fashioned way, the process can be daunting. Although labor-intensive, it’s vital you be as thorough as possible – working through your configuration managers, change logs, and/or homemade enforcement architecture. 

An automated alternative

GYTPOL makes gathering configuration data simple and efficient by taking the heavy lifting off your team’s shoulders. Instead of relying on time-consuming, manual data collation, GYTPOL continuously and automatically monitors your network – collecting real-time data across all devices. This means that at any moment, your team has a clear view of current and historical configuration states.

Step 4: Identify Misconfigurations

Once your data is collected, it’s time to start sifting through it all. You’ll want to see how your golden images stack up against the reality in the field, where drift goes undetected, and where enforcement fails.  

The manual approach

Start by cross-referencing live configurations with your defined security policies. The level of scrutiny required can feel tedious, but it’s necessary to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

An automated alternative

GYTPOL simplifies and accelerates this process by automatically scanning your entire network for misconfigurations. It identifies issues such as open ports, unpatched vulnerabilities, insecure protocols, weak credentials, and non-compliant configurations in real time.

GYTPOL not only detects these issues but automatically cross-references the findings with your company’s security policies. This provides a complete view of your system’s configuration health and compliance status. GYTPOL provides continuous monitoring, ensuring that new misconfigurations are detected as they arise, reducing the window of exposure.

Step 5: Prioritize Misconfigurations

Not all misconfigurations carry the same weight — one could be a huge risk and a quick fix, while another could be barely of consequence and immensely difficult to fix. Evaluate misconfigurations based on exploitability, the impact on business operations, and the ease of remediation.

Critical misconfigurations, like unpatched vulnerabilities or exposed data, should take precedence over less severe issues. The goal is to allocate resources when and where they are most critical – addressing the most pressing threats first.

It begins by classifying insecure configurations by severity, focusing on those that could lead to significant data breaches, downtime, or critical disruptions. High-risk issues are addressed immediately to reduce the organization's risk profile, while lower-priority risks are monitored for any changes in urgency. 

Having said that, distinguishing between high-risk configurations and lower-priority issues is often more complex than expected.

The manual approach

To prioritize any misconfiguration, you must first have a complete inventory of every misconfiguration. And that's where your problems start.

Compiling such an exhaustive list naturally runs the risk that you’ll be chasing small things when your time would be better spent fixing big things. It also means you need to investigate and fully understand the implications of each issue faced before you can compare them. 

Sometimes that's as simple as looking at the CVSS, but often it'll be much more complicated – requiring an understanding of the extent of exposure, the severity of potential compromise, the complexity of exploitation, and ease of mitigation/remediation.

An automated alternative

The right tools streamline the prioritization process – automatically ranking misconfigurations according to severity, exploitability, and business dependencies. This makes it possible to optimize your efforts by focusing on the most impactful areas first. 

Step 6: Remediate Misconfigurations

Start chipping away at each of the problems you’ve found: changing default logins to secure credentials, closing off unnecessary open ports, and applying patches to outdated software, firmware, and drivers.

Changes must be implemented in a way that makes adoption and enforcement easy to manage and maintain without risking business disruption.

The manual approach

Remediation requires both an understanding of the problem and of the underlying context in which it exists. As the old (and very weird) adage goes, there are many ways to skin a cat. And while any one of those ways can get the job done, that doesn’t mean they’re all equally good. 

You need to consider the stability and scalability of the solution, the effort required, and the ripple effect. Each action demands careful evaluation and understanding of the potential impact. 

An automated alternative

Eliminating hidden risks one by one is an easy way to drain budgets and stress staff. At this stage, utilizing some sort of advanced automation is a no-brainer — from saving time to enforcing policies consistently and universally across systems to minimizing the risk of unintended business impact.

As you continue to strengthen your posture, remember to record any changes made and communicate them to relevant stakeholders. 

Step 7: Validate and Re-Evaluate

Once all identified misconfigurations are swept up and changes have been implemented, it may be tempting to wash your hands of the process. But that’d be a mistake. 

Now that you’ve made sure reality on the ground matches the plan on paper, you’d be wise to double-check that plan and make sure it’s still up to snuff. Take a moment to re-evaluate your policies and procedures. Are they still effective in your current environment? Do they address the latest threats?

When considering whether your policies were properly fit for purpose, you’ll want to cross-check them against industry standard guidelines like CIS and NIST. 

You’ll also want to spend some time investigating how the misconfigurations you uncovered came about in the first place and how they went undetected prior to your audit. With that information in tow, you’ll be able to update your policies and internal procedures as needed.

Ultimately, you should have a list of change recommendations to put before the Change Advisory Board. These recommendations should be formed with the goal of preventing future misconfigurations.

They should take the wider organization into account when it comes to their ease of implementation, scalability, sustainability, and business continuity. And they should provide a basis for new golden images  maximizing the hardening-for-effort quotient by focusing on low-hanging fruit and shallow cuts.

Mastery Over Misconfiguration: Difficult, But Possible

Security is an ongoing process. If you’re looking to streamline your next audit, you’ll want to focus on avoiding misconfigurations in the first place, not just correcting them later on. 

Tools like GYTPOL provide continuous monitoring and remediation of misconfigurations across environments. These tools ensure compliance with standards like CIS and ISO. Creating a hands-free configuration security lifecycle keeps policies consistently enforced across all systems. 

By embracing proactive strategies and maintaining vigilance, you can transform a periodic headache into a painless and continuous process.