Discussion Board: OS Hardening

You provide a lecture to the working group regarding the importance of security education, awareness, and training due to the oft-quoted security maxim that users/humans are the weakest link in the security chain. While making users aware of security risks and training them how to protect company assets will reduce risk, it is important to put technical controls in place to protect the operating systems and applications that employees use every day.
Discuss the importance of “hardening” the PCS client workstations and servers. Make recommendations for operating system hardening options and describe how these are related to the concept of “system-specific policies” discussed earlier in the course. One of the working group members blurts out that antivirus protection is a waste of computing resources and patching applications takes too much time. Be sure to address these two concepts in your initial thread. Include at least one research reference and associated in-text citation using APA standards. In your replies to your peers further, discuss the importance of software security.