Security Hardening
Proactively close the gaps before an attacker finds them.
We take your existing infrastructure and harden it against the threats most likely to hit your industry. Server, network, identity, application, and cloud-config hardening — backed by a baseline that survives an audit.
ROE signed before any work · 30 minutes response
The problem
Default configs are built for compatibility, not for your threat model.
Defaults optimize for 'it works', not 'it's safe'
Cloud providers, OS vendors, and framework maintainers ship configs that minimize support tickets, not attack surface. Open management ports, permissive IAM defaults, and unpatched-by-default services survive until someone deliberately closes them.
Hardening decays after go-live
A CIS-compliant baseline at launch drifts within weeks — a new service gets deployed without the same controls, an emergency change reopens a port 'temporarily', a new admin account skips MFA enrollment. Nobody notices until an audit or an incident.
Checklists without a threat model waste effort
Running through a generic CIS benchmark top to bottom spends equal effort on paths attackers rarely use and paths they hit first. A casino's identity layer and a SaaS company's cloud config are not the same priority order.
Pentest findings get patched, not systematized
Teams fix the specific finding from last quarter's pentest report and move on, without codifying the fix as a reproducible baseline. The same class of misconfiguration reappears on the next host, the next environment, the next audit.
Scope of work
What's included
Everything below is delivered by senior engineers — no scanner-only reports, no junior hand-offs.
- Server hardening (Linux + Windows): CIS / NIST benchmarks
- Network hardening: segmentation, ACLs, IDS tuning
- Identity hardening: MFA, conditional access, AD/Azure AD
- Application hardening: WAF, CSP, secure headers
- Cloud config hardening (AWS / Azure / GCP)
- Documented baseline you can re-apply
Methodology
How we run it
- 01Current-state assessment
- 02Threat-model the most likely attack paths
- 03Apply hardening in change-windowed phases
- 04Validate with re-test against the same TTPs
- 05Hand over reproducible baseline
Comparison
Hardening done properly.
| Feature | AnySec | Generic firm | DIY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Output format | Ansible / Terraform / CIS-CAT — codified | PDF policy document | Tribal knowledge |
| Validation | Re-test with same TTPs after hardening | Trust-me | Hope |
| Reproducibility | Apply the baseline to new hosts in seconds | Manual checklist | Per-host work |
“Our DevOps team can now apply our hardening baseline to a new EC2 instance with a single Ansible run. Before AnySec, it was a 3-day manual checklist.”
— Head of Platform · Series B SaaS
Deliverables
What you receive
- Hardening implementation report
- Reproducible baseline (Ansible / Terraform / CIS-CAT)
- Pre/post comparison scorecard
Our commitments
Skin in the game.
- Hardening reverts cleanly if it breaks anything
- Baseline is codified — not a PDF you'll lose
- Pre/post scorecard quantifies the change
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Do you do this alongside a pentest?+
Often, yes. Pentest first to discover, harden second to remediate, retest third to verify.
Will hardening break anything?+
Done well, no. We test in staging, change-window in production, and roll back any item that breaks a real workflow.
Which frameworks and benchmarks do you harden against?+
CIS Benchmarks and NIST as the baseline, plus industry-specific controls where they apply — PCI-DSS for operators handling card data, and the segmentation and access controls regulated casinos and fintechs are held to.
How is this different from just running a CIS-CAT scan ourselves?+
A scan tells you where you fall short of a benchmark. We threat-model the paths most likely to hit your sector, apply the fixes in change windows, validate them by re-testing the actual attacker TTPs, and hand back a codified baseline — not a PDF of gaps you still have to close.
What do we get to keep afterwards?+
A reproducible baseline as Ansible / Terraform / CIS-CAT config, so your team can apply the same hardened state to a new host in seconds instead of working through a manual checklist, plus a pre/post scorecard that quantifies the change.
More from AnySec
Related cybersecurity services
Security Hardening pairs with the rest of the AnySec catalog — offensive testing, 24/7 defensive operations, incident response, and resilient infrastructure, all delivered by the same EU-registered team.
Defensive · HARDEN-STD
Ready to start Hardening?
Request a fixed quote, or book a free 30-minute scoping call first. 30 minutes response either way.
ROE signed before any test fires · 1–2 weeks