Now that we have downloaded the files,
let's go ahead and explore them as we start working with the security baseline.
The first folder that I'm going to focus on is the Windows
Server‑2022‑Security‑Baseline‑FINAL folder.
This is the actual baseline that we're going to be
working with within Policy Analyzer.
Now, as you navigate through the baseline,
you'll see that there are a number of different folders.
The first folder, which is Documentation,
has some important documents that you should look at, the
first one being the New Settings document.
This document highlights all of the New Settings that
has been introduced in this baseline.
This will also show you the new settings that would work with Server 2022.
The next document is the one that's titled FINAL,
followed by Microsoft Security Baseline.
This document shows you all of the settings that is available for Server 2022.
It also shows you the various recommendations from Microsoft in
relation to the setting that needs to be configured and the
configuration option of the setting.
Now,
Microsoft does a good job by splitting the settings based on if it's been
applied to a member server or to a domain controller.
Most of the time, the settings would be the same,
however, sometimes they are actually different,
and you'll see the differences highlighted as you navigate through the document.
As you work through a document,
you'll notice that some of the settings do not have anything applied to it.
This means that these settings take the default
configuration of the setting itself.
To illustrate, if you look at the Audit setting for Process Creation,
here, Microsoft is defining an explicit setting,
which is Success.
Comparing this to the audit process termination,
there are no settings applied, which means the default setting would take place.
The next file which is important is the one that has a type POLICYRULES.
This file is one that we're going to actually use with the Policy Analyzer.
The next folder, which is GP Reports,
essentially is a report of the group policy.
This gives you a nice,
clean view of the settings that's supplied for each of the different group
policies and the specific category of the group policy.
GPOs is where you would actually find the group policy itself.
Within this folder,
you will have all of the group policies that you could simply
import into your group policy management.
Now remember,
the aim of working with the baseline is to actually compare Microsoft
Security Baseline to our current configured group policy.
So we are not going to simply just import this,
we first want to compare what we have configured in
relation to the security baseline.
And again, that is where Policy Analyzer comes into play.
Within the Scripts folder,
you will find a couple of handy scripts that you can
leverage with relation to the baseline.
These include scripts such as importing the baseline into Active
Directory or installing it locally on the server.
And lastly, under Templates,
we will have the ADMX templates that would provide the
settings that is shown in the group policy.
All we need to do is we need to just copy these ADMX templates to
the relevant locations within Active Directory.
So now that we've gone through the baseline itself, let's work with Policy Analyzer.