Many businesses believe that when they have a firewall in place, including to all of their third party connections, traffic is inspected and filtered, and they are fully patched up-to-date that they are safe from attack. Unfortunately attackers can be quite persistent, that's why ADP recommend that businesses run System Hardening.
There are cases where malicious traffic will get through the firewall and infiltrate networks. Many forget about Wireless Access Points, for example, employees carrying notebook computers, CDs, MP3 players and USB devices. All of these methods of communications are either not seen by a firewall at all or allowed by the firewall but could still harbour malicious code within.
System Hardening checks the configuration of applications and disables unnecessary services and processes so that they no longer run at start-up. The aim of this process is to reduce the likelihood that an anonymous network connection might be able to exploit a vulnerable service on the host in order to run malicious code of an attacker's choice. This is the last chance to stop the hacker or virus gaining a foothold within your network.
ADP can evaluate your systems for any configuration errors or vulnerable services which may be present and provide you with solutions for closing these holes.
