1 00:00:00,870 --> 00:00:02,890 Securing Applications. 2 00:00:02,890 --> 00:00:05,850 By far, the most commonly used productivity suite 3 00:00:05,850 --> 00:00:08,300 in the world is Microsoft Office. 4 00:00:08,300 --> 00:00:10,590 This includes Word for word processing, 5 00:00:10,590 --> 00:00:14,050 Excel for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for slide presentations, 6 00:00:14,050 --> 00:00:16,600 Outlook for email and many others. 7 00:00:16,600 --> 00:00:19,620 Now, how can we protect the applications themselves 8 00:00:19,620 --> 00:00:21,300 and the files that they create? 9 00:00:21,300 --> 00:00:23,990 Well, that's what we're going to cover in this lesson. 10 00:00:23,990 --> 00:00:26,270 First, let's talk about the obvious. 11 00:00:26,270 --> 00:00:29,070 If you have a document and you want to protect its contents, 12 00:00:29,070 --> 00:00:31,070 you should use a password to do it. 13 00:00:31,070 --> 00:00:32,980 It's a really simple built-in feature 14 00:00:32,980 --> 00:00:34,890 across the Office Suite. 15 00:00:34,890 --> 00:00:37,780 To create a password to protect your files from modification 16 00:00:37,780 --> 00:00:39,100 or even being viewed, 17 00:00:39,100 --> 00:00:41,630 you can do this using the Password Protect Feature 18 00:00:41,630 --> 00:00:43,620 under the tools menu bar option, 19 00:00:43,620 --> 00:00:45,180 as shown here on the screen. 20 00:00:45,180 --> 00:00:47,220 This is an example from Microsoft Word, 21 00:00:47,220 --> 00:00:50,290 but it works in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. 22 00:00:50,290 --> 00:00:53,490 Also, your files can be set to read-only if you desire. 23 00:00:53,490 --> 00:00:55,310 This will prevent any other contents 24 00:00:55,310 --> 00:00:58,240 from being modified by unauthorized users. 25 00:00:58,240 --> 00:00:59,450 Another thing you want to think about 26 00:00:59,450 --> 00:01:01,540 when it comes to security is macros, 27 00:01:01,540 --> 00:01:02,950 and we talked about that a bit 28 00:01:02,950 --> 00:01:05,630 back when we talked about macro viruses. 29 00:01:05,630 --> 00:01:07,970 You want to make sure you check your macro settings. 30 00:01:07,970 --> 00:01:09,830 You can find this under your Preferences 31 00:01:09,830 --> 00:01:13,350 or your Tools option, and then going to the Security tab. 32 00:01:13,350 --> 00:01:16,300 By default, you should want to disable macros 33 00:01:16,300 --> 00:01:18,150 with or without notification. 34 00:01:18,150 --> 00:01:21,090 This will increase the security of your organization. 35 00:01:21,090 --> 00:01:23,690 Now, when it's installed originally by Microsoft, 36 00:01:23,690 --> 00:01:26,230 macros are enabled so you want to take the time 37 00:01:26,230 --> 00:01:28,660 to disable this in your baseline image. 38 00:01:28,660 --> 00:01:30,620 Most organizations are going to decide 39 00:01:30,620 --> 00:01:32,440 to disable macros completely 40 00:01:32,440 --> 00:01:34,550 and not even give their user an option 41 00:01:34,550 --> 00:01:35,880 to be able to enable them. 42 00:01:35,880 --> 00:01:38,750 To do this, you can set that through your group policy 43 00:01:38,750 --> 00:01:40,250 inside the Windows Server 44 00:01:40,250 --> 00:01:42,700 and push that out to all of your clients. 45 00:01:42,700 --> 00:01:44,890 Another way to secure your information 46 00:01:44,890 --> 00:01:46,900 is to use digital certificates. 47 00:01:46,900 --> 00:01:49,360 If your organization is already using digital certificates 48 00:01:49,360 --> 00:01:51,400 as part of its organizational security, 49 00:01:51,400 --> 00:01:53,680 you should enable your documents to be locked down 50 00:01:53,680 --> 00:01:55,500 and only be opened by the person 51 00:01:55,500 --> 00:01:57,680 presenting a valid digital certificate. 52 00:01:57,680 --> 00:01:59,330 This again is another option 53 00:01:59,330 --> 00:02:01,650 that you can find inside of Word. 54 00:02:01,650 --> 00:02:03,190 Additionally, you want to think about 55 00:02:03,190 --> 00:02:04,880 how you're going to encrypt your documents 56 00:02:04,880 --> 00:02:06,580 to protect their contents. 57 00:02:06,580 --> 00:02:07,413 This can be done 58 00:02:07,413 --> 00:02:09,860 within the Microsoft Office products themselves, 59 00:02:09,860 --> 00:02:12,600 or you can use the underlying system capabilities, 60 00:02:12,600 --> 00:02:14,830 something like BitLocker To Go. 61 00:02:14,830 --> 00:02:17,280 So at this point, we have some pretty secure files. 62 00:02:17,280 --> 00:02:20,160 We've disabled our macros, we've password protected them, 63 00:02:20,160 --> 00:02:21,500 and we've encrypted them. 64 00:02:21,500 --> 00:02:24,520 Let's go and shift our focus over to email for a moment. 65 00:02:24,520 --> 00:02:26,280 Inside the Microsoft Office Suite, 66 00:02:26,280 --> 00:02:28,580 there's a program called MS Outlook. 67 00:02:28,580 --> 00:02:30,970 Microsoft Outlook is used for email, 68 00:02:30,970 --> 00:02:33,030 and if you embed your digital signatures 69 00:02:33,030 --> 00:02:34,960 and digital certificate configurations 70 00:02:34,960 --> 00:02:36,430 into Microsoft Outlook, 71 00:02:36,430 --> 00:02:39,010 you can have increased email security. 72 00:02:39,010 --> 00:02:42,600 This relies on a PKI or Public Key Infrastructure. 73 00:02:42,600 --> 00:02:43,650 We'll talk about that when we get 74 00:02:43,650 --> 00:02:46,610 into the cryptography section of this course later on. 75 00:02:46,610 --> 00:02:48,120 Now, another thing when we start talking 76 00:02:48,120 --> 00:02:50,540 about Microsoft Outlook is that our emails 77 00:02:50,540 --> 00:02:53,010 start getting to be overwhelming sometimes, 78 00:02:53,010 --> 00:02:56,580 and we have to start saving space by archiving them off. 79 00:02:56,580 --> 00:02:57,750 In Microsoft Outlook, 80 00:02:57,750 --> 00:03:01,130 the way we do this is by archiving them to a PST file. 81 00:03:01,130 --> 00:03:04,100 Now, this PST file though should be encrypted 82 00:03:04,100 --> 00:03:05,390 or password protected 83 00:03:05,390 --> 00:03:08,060 if you're going to store it on a large network share 84 00:03:08,060 --> 00:03:09,460 like a shared drive. 85 00:03:09,460 --> 00:03:11,340 I see this a lot in organizations 86 00:03:11,340 --> 00:03:13,410 where they'll only give you a certain amount of space 87 00:03:13,410 --> 00:03:14,680 on the email server. 88 00:03:14,680 --> 00:03:17,620 So people will archive their files off into a PST, 89 00:03:17,620 --> 00:03:19,570 and then put that onto the share drive. 90 00:03:19,570 --> 00:03:21,740 If you're going to do that, password protect it 91 00:03:21,740 --> 00:03:24,490 and encrypt it for your own safety and precaution. 92 00:03:24,490 --> 00:03:26,600 Another concern we have when we deal with email 93 00:03:26,600 --> 00:03:30,210 is spam and junk mail, and you can get a lot of this. 94 00:03:30,210 --> 00:03:32,150 If you want to start removing a lot of that, 95 00:03:32,150 --> 00:03:33,440 you should set up rules 96 00:03:33,440 --> 00:03:35,490 that will end up filtering out that spam, 97 00:03:35,490 --> 00:03:37,330 both on your Exchange Server 98 00:03:37,330 --> 00:03:39,630 as well as on your personal computer. 99 00:03:39,630 --> 00:03:42,010 Again, Microsoft Outlook will allow you to do this 100 00:03:42,010 --> 00:03:43,570 on your application side 101 00:03:43,570 --> 00:03:45,730 or Microsoft Exchange will allow you to do it 102 00:03:45,730 --> 00:03:47,790 on the server side. 103 00:03:47,790 --> 00:03:49,940 So as we start wrapping up this lesson, 104 00:03:49,940 --> 00:03:51,570 let's start talking about what you can do 105 00:03:51,570 --> 00:03:54,690 to help protect yourself from rogue applications. 106 00:03:54,690 --> 00:03:56,940 Now, this is going to move beyond the Microsoft Office Suite 107 00:03:56,940 --> 00:03:59,490 and into every other application out there. 108 00:03:59,490 --> 00:04:01,810 There's one key tool inside of Windows 109 00:04:01,810 --> 00:04:02,900 that helps protect you. 110 00:04:02,900 --> 00:04:05,480 It's called the User Account Control. 111 00:04:05,480 --> 00:04:08,610 UAC is a security component of Windows Vista 112 00:04:08,610 --> 00:04:11,650 and newer operating systems that keeps every user, 113 00:04:11,650 --> 00:04:13,980 besides your actual administrator account, 114 00:04:13,980 --> 00:04:15,690 in a standard user mode. 115 00:04:15,690 --> 00:04:17,610 And this way, when you try to run a program, 116 00:04:17,610 --> 00:04:19,590 it's going to ask you if you want it to be run 117 00:04:19,590 --> 00:04:20,770 as an administrator. 118 00:04:20,770 --> 00:04:23,780 And if so, you need to put in the administrator credentials. 119 00:04:23,780 --> 00:04:27,130 So when you think about UAC or User Account Control, 120 00:04:27,130 --> 00:04:28,070 just think about the fact 121 00:04:28,070 --> 00:04:30,140 that it's going to prevent unauthorized access 122 00:04:30,140 --> 00:04:33,570 and avoid user error in the form of accidental changes, 123 00:04:33,570 --> 00:04:36,360 because it's running everything as a standard user, 124 00:04:36,360 --> 00:04:38,610 as opposed to running it as an administrator.