The Operating Model to Cut Network Downtime Every Year
Data is not the problem. What you do with it is. For years, network teams have lacked insight into downtime even with… More telemetry. More dashboards. More alerts. … And...
Networks face a constant barrage of threats from malicious actors who actively seek out vulnerabilities to exploit. As a result, network hardening has become a critical practice that organizations must diligently undertake to fortify their defenses and eliminate potential security weaknesses.
While it is impossible to achieve complete immunity to attacks, implementing robust network hardening measures can significantly reduce the likelihood of successful data breaches and mitigate potential damages.
What Is Network Hardening?
Network hardening refers to the configuration of systems to minimize vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of cybercrime. Cyber attacks have evolved to become more covert and targeted. So, your network services and systems need reinforcement to become more resilient to attacks.
Cybersecurity hardening secures networks from external security threats and internal vulnerabilities. It first identifies security vulnerabilities such as access, programs, outdated network devices, default passwords, and unencrypted data, and, like a door left wide open, it closes them.
Network hardening techniques that once involved blocking unauthorized network access have since become outdated, as they only focused on firewalls. Modern attacks bypass perimeters because of the increased remote access by employees and third-party access.
By automating network operations, administrators can enhance network device hardening by disabling unused ports and services, installing software updates and security patches, implementing strong access controls, enforcing secure firewall configurations, and monitoring network traffic for malicious activities.
Operating system hardening strengthens network defenses and keeps the systems resilient by making it harder for hackers to gain unauthorized network access or move laterally within the network once they have breached perimeter security controls.
Why You Should Harden Your Network
Network hardening is essential for protecting organizational assets from cyber threats and data breaches. The frequency and complexity of cybercrime have seen financial firms lose around $12 billion in the last twenty years, threatening global financial stability.
Hardening network security helps keep your networks safe from external and internal attacks. Hackers constantly probe networks for weak points like open ports and unpatched systems. With more sensitive data leaving the office to remote places and the over-reliance on cloud storage, network hardening should be a primary focus.
Access to data on business networks results in compromises that could lead to reputational damage, financial losses, and legal liability. Hardening strengthens network defenses to mitigate risks, meet compliance needs, and help ensure network operations run without security incidents.
On top of safeguarding an organization’s network against malicious attacks, server hardening has additional benefits. A network hardening checklist helps improve performance and security, as hackers can exploit fewer exposed weaknesses. Hardening also streamlines auditing and compliance tasks by reducing the number of programs.
With a hardened system, there are fewer chances of potential entry points for hackers, strengthening the entire network and enhancing your organization’s security posture.
The 3 Key Phases of Network Hardening
The hardening network process comprises three key phases, each serving unique objectives and presenting distinct challenges. Let’s explore each phase and its significance in ensuring network security.
Phase 1: Document the Existing Network Design and Configuration
To effectively address security vulnerabilities, the first step is to understand the network’s design and configuration. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with outdated or incomplete network documentation, which hinders their ability to identify potential risks, like Telnet-enabled, accurately.
Automating the process of network documentation can provide a dynamic view of the network, enabling real-time insights into security and application traffic flows. By leveraging tools like Dynamic Maps, organizations can automate the documentation process, offering edge-to-cloud visibility, detailed asset reports, and comprehensive network diagrams. Additionally, advanced features such as NetBrain’s A/B path calculator can validate access lists and firewall policies to ensure proper traffic filtering across the network.
Phase 2: Identify and Remediate Security Vulnerabilities
The second phase of network hardening involves identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities. Traditionally, this process relied on manual analysis or custom scripts, both of which had limitations. Manual analysis was time-consuming and prone to errors, while custom scripts lacked portability and were challenging to maintain.
Automation tools such as NetBrain’s NextGen network automation offer a more efficient approach. NetBrain’s NextGen can continuously validate network configurations against a predefined set of “golden rules” encompassing security best practices. These rules can include encryption of device passwords, proper configuration of timeouts, consistent settings for HA pairs, and prevention of insecure protocols.
By automating the validation process, organizations can proactively identify and rectify any deviations from the desired security posture.
Phase 3: Safeguard Against Future Vulnerabilities
The final phase of hardening a network focuses on establishing robust practices and processes to safeguard against future vulnerabilities. It is imperative to ensure consistent adherence to security policies across all network teams within the organization. By leveraging the golden rules identified in the previous phase, security teams can create no-code automation that serves as comprehensive and actionable guides for future remediation efforts.
This automation encompasses intents, or design guides, that enforce security best practices, providing clear guidelines on configuration and regulation standards (like NIST), access controls, and recommended protocols. Implementation engineers can utilize these runbooks to execute vulnerability assessments whenever network changes or new application installations occur.
By automating regular vulnerability assessments, organizations can proactively identify and address any potential security gaps or deviations from the established security standards.
Automation tools like NetBrain’s NextGen event management system play a pivotal role in streamlining the hardening network process. These tools can be configured to automatically trigger vulnerability assessments whenever changes are made to the network. By automating the assessment process, organizations can ensure that any modifications or updates made to the network infrastructure align with the predefined security standards, reducing the risk of inadvertently introducing vulnerabilities.
The Bottom Line
Network hardening is a crucial and ongoing practice for organizations dedicated to protecting their networks from evolving cyber threats. By diligently following the three essential phases of network hardening — documenting network design, identifying vulnerabilities, and implementing security practices — organizations can significantly enhance their network’s security posture.
Leveraging automation tools, such as NetBrain’s NextGen network visualization tools, simplifies and accelerates the process, enabling proactive enforcement of security measures and ensuring a resilient network infrastructure.
Embrace the power of network hardening strategies, like automation, to safeguard your network from potential threats and mitigate the risks associated with today’s dynamic threat landscape.
For further guidance and expertise on network hardening and how it can effectively strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity initiatives, do not hesitate to reach out to our team of experts. We are committed to helping organizations build robust and secure networks that can withstand the challenges posed by modern cyber threats.
Network Hardening Best Practices and Checklist
Turning the principles of network hardening into action requires a clear, repeatable process. The following checklist serves as a practical playbook to help network and security teams systematically reduce their organization’s attack surface. By following these steps, your team can move from reactive defense to proactive control of your digital environment.
Fortify Network Access Control
With effective access control, the right people have the right level of access.
- Implement least-privilege access: Every user, application, and system should operate with the bare minimum permissions required to perform its function. Use role-based access control (RBAC) profiles for administrators and limit service account permissions to essential tasks.
- Enforce strong authentication policies:Require MFA for all administrative access, apply password complexity rules, and automate password rotation. Stolen credentials remain one of the top attack vectors, so strengthening authentication directly reduces risk.
- Conduct regular user access audits: Systematically review all user accounts and privileges. Identify and disable dormant or orphaned accounts, verify that permissions align with job roles, and coordinate with HR systems to ensure timely de-provisioning when staff leave the organization.
Secure Network Devices and Services
A hardened network begins with secure devices and the disciplined management of what runs on them.
- Minimize the operational attack surface:Every open port or running service is a potential entry point. Scan for unnecessary services, such as Telnet or FTP. Disable defaults, including SNMP community strings, and standardize shutdown procedures across routers, switches, and servers.
- Establish a proactive patch management cadence:Update all firmware and software with the latest security patches. You can also track vendor notifications for security patches, test patches in staging environments, and roll them out on a risk-based schedule that prioritizes critical vulnerabilities.
- Harden core network hardware configurations: Change all default credentials immediately. Disable unnecessary management interfaces, such as HTTP on core devices. It’s important to use encrypted management protocols and apply control-plane policing to protect device CPUs from overload or abuse.
Architect a Resilient and Segmented Network
Even the strongest perimeter defenses can be bypassed, so internal segmentation and encryption are critical safeguards.
- Implement strategic network segmentation:Divide your environment into functional zones using VLANs and firewalls. Think of each segment as a watertight compartment on a ship — a breach in one area is contained and cannot sink the entire vessel. Segmentation limits lateral movement by attackers and contains potential compromises.
- Encrypt all sensitive data in transit: Use TLS 1.2 or 1.3 for web and management traffic and IPsec for VPNs. Encryption ensures that even if data is intercepted, it remains unreadable and unusable to outsiders.
Enable Proactive Monitoring and Response
Continuous visibility transforms network hardening from a one-time project into an ongoing discipline.
- Centralize and analyze device logs: Configure all routers, switches, and firewalls to forward logs to a centralized SIEM platform. This allows security teams to correlate events across the network and detect patterns indicative of an attack that would be invisible on a single device.
- Maintain and test configuration backups: Automate the backup of all device configurations and test restoration regularly. Reliable, verified backups mean recovery can begin immediately if a device is compromised or fails.
How Automation Simplifies Network Hardening
Even with a solid checklist in place, applying these practices across a large, distributed network can quickly overwhelm even the most experienced teams. Networks grow, configurations drift, and compliance requirements evolve. Keeping everything hardened and up to date through manual effort alone isn’t sustainable.
That’s where automation and modern network hardening tools step in to make these best practices continuous, consistent, and scalable.
Put Your Hardening Strategy on Autopilot With NetBrain
NetBrain’s automation platform brings intelligence and scale to every phase of network hardening:
- Automate Phase 1 with dynamic discovery and documentation: NetBrain’s Network Auto-Discovery engine automatically discovers and maps your entire hybrid network, creating a live digital twin that updates in real time. Instead of relying on static diagrams that quickly become outdated, teams gain instant visibility into every device, topology, and connection.
- Automate Phase 2 with continuous configuration auditing: Use Golden Engineering Studio to create and maintain “golden configs” or security intents, and continuously assess your devices against those baselines. Any drift, noncompliance, or misconfiguration is automatically flagged.
- Automate Phase 3 with proactive defense and diagnostics: Let NetBrain NextGen’s Protective Change Management validate every change before deployment, monitor in real time during rollouts, and roll back automatically if something goes wrong. Combined with path visualization and Auto Remediation, you’ll have the tools to detect, isolate, and resolve security incidents quickly.
Partner With NetBrain
Your systems and network contain valuable data that we want to protect from cybercriminals. Don’t let the integrity of your network be compromised. Instead, let network hardening provide a robust system that keeps attackers out and safeguards your internal operating systems. Implementing hardening methods will keep your organization safe and compliant with regulations and ease auditing.
At NetBrain, we stand out as the sole No-Code Day-2 network automation platform. Our team of experts provides you with network hardening best practices, such as automation and visibility, to simplify tasks, maintain compliance, and strengthen your network infrastructure.
We’ll help you automate continuous network-wide assessments to identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, address the problems, and harden the network. Let our end-to-end network operations tools, from network mapping to network visualization, help provide you with a centralized view of the full network topology, including assets, interfaces, routes, and more.