This document provides administrator guidance for how to set up and configure secure Windows 2000 systems in several scenarios. This document is a baseline for other hardening guides published by Microsoft, such as the Microsoft Solutions for Security.
This document is not meant as a replacement for the Windows 2000 Common Criteria Security Configuration Guide, but rather as a more generally applicable hardening guide which applies to a much broader range of specific systems which may include or exclude services specified in the Windows 2000 Common Criteria evaluated configuration. The Common Criteria guide is designed for general purpose systems that specifically need to be compliant with the Common Criteria evaluation requirements and sacrifices some usability to do so. The document you are currently reading is designed to provide more generic guidance for a wider range of specific system classes, without necessarily trading off basic operating system functionality. The recommendations in this guide were generally chosen to safely allow Microsoft customers to deploy the recommended settings on existing Windows 2000 systems, not just on newly-built systems. We have also reviewed the default permissions on Windows Server 20003 and recommended those permissions here where they did not break existing Windows 2000 Server services.
This guide covers hardening of Windows 2000 in three different configurations each for Windows 2000 Professional and the Windows 2000 Server family. The configurations are designed to be very generic to enhance applicability.