Windows 7 has been released to the consumer market and small business integrators, administrators and owners should start thinking about their strategy for deployment and how they will go about securing their environment. From our experiences with the beta, release candidate and official release (RTM) versions of Windows 7, I must say we’ve come a long way from the days of using National Security Agency (NSA) templates to harden and secure enterprise computers. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft started delivering products that were significantly more secure than previous versions out of the box.
In this fast moving internet age, the biggest threats these days come from malicious trojan executables and user laziness. The trojans you can get tricked into allowing into your computer system; the laziness is what happens when users naively lower their default Operating System defenses like disabling the User Account Control (UAC) in Vista and/or Windows 7, turning off automatic patching and deactivating the built-in firewall. The UAC and firewall, by the way, performs the same functions as applications we spend money on with products like Zone Alarm, Norton, McAfee etc. where you get notified if an application is trying to do something fishy.
