-: Securing Applications.
By far, the most commonly used productivity suite
in the world is Microsoft Office.
This includes Word for word processing,
Excel for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for slide presentations,
Outlook for email and many others.
Now, how can we protect the applications themselves
and the files that they create?
Well, that's what we're going to cover in this lesson.
First, let's talk about the obvious.
If you have a document and you want to protect its contents,
you should use a password to do it.
It's a really simple built-in feature
across the Office Suite.
To create a password to protect your files from modification
or even being viewed,
you can do this using the Password Protect Feature
under the tools menu bar option,
as shown here on the screen.
This is an example from Microsoft Word,
but it works in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Also, your files can be set to read-only if you desire.
This will prevent any other contents
from being modified by unauthorized users.
Another thing you want to think about
when it comes to security is macros,
and we talked about that a bit
back when we talked about macro viruses.
You want to make sure you check your macro settings.
You can find this under your Preferences
or your Tools option, and then going to the Security tab.
By default, you should want to disable macros
with or without notification.
This will increase the security of your organization.
Now, when it's installed originally by Microsoft,
macros are enabled so you want to take the time
to disable this in your baseline image.
Most organizations are going to decide
to disable macros completely
and not even give their user an option
to be able to enable them.
To do this, you can set that through your group policy
inside the Windows Server
and push that out to all of your clients.
Another way to secure your information
is to use digital certificates.
If your organization is already using digital certificates
as part of its organizational security,
you should enable your documents to be locked down
and only be opened by the person
presenting a valid digital certificate.
This again is another option
that you can find inside of Word.
Additionally, you want to think about
how you're going to encrypt your documents
to protect their contents.
This can be done
within the Microsoft Office products themselves,
or you can use the underlying system capabilities,
something like BitLocker To Go.
So at this point, we have some pretty secure files.
We've disabled our macros, we've password protected them,
and we've encrypted them.
Let's go and shift our focus over to email for a moment.
Inside the Microsoft Office Suite,
there's a program called MS Outlook.
Microsoft Outlook is used for email,
and if you embed your digital signatures
and digital certificate configurations
into Microsoft Outlook,
you can have increased email security.
This relies on a PKI or Public Key Infrastructure.
We'll talk about that when we get
into the cryptography section of this course later on.
Now, another thing when we start talking
about Microsoft Outlook is that our emails
start getting to be overwhelming sometimes,
and we have to start saving space by archiving them off.
In Microsoft Outlook,
the way we do this is by archiving them to a PST file.
Now, this PST file though should be encrypted
or password protected
if you're going to store it on a large network share
like a shared drive.
I see this a lot in organizations
where they'll only give you a certain amount of space
on the email server.
So people will archive their files off into a PST,
and then put that onto the share drive.
If you're going to do that, password protect it
and encrypt it for your own safety and precaution.
Another concern we have when we deal with email
is spam and junk mail, and you can get a lot of this.
If you want to start removing a lot of that,
you should set up rules
that will end up filtering out that spam,
both on your Exchange Server
as well as on your personal computer.
Again, Microsoft Outlook will allow you to do this
on your application side
or Microsoft Exchange will allow you to do it
on the server side.
So as we start wrapping up this lesson,
let's start talking about what you can do
to help protect yourself from rogue applications.
Now, this is going to move beyond the Microsoft Office Suite
and into every other application out there.
There's one key tool inside of Windows
that helps protect you.
It's called the User Account Control.
UAC is a security component of Windows Vista
and newer operating systems that keeps every user,
besides your actual administrator account,
in a standard user mode.
And this way, when you try to run a program,
it's going to ask you if you want it to be run
as an administrator.
And if so, you need to put in the administrator credentials.
So when you think about UAC or User Account Control,
just think about the fact
that it's going to prevent unauthorized access
and avoid user error in the form of accidental changes,
because it's running everything as a standard user,
as opposed to running it as an administrator.