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Windows Server 2000 Security Hardening

Jan 2020 to Feb 2020

Blue-team hardening lab on a deliberately vulnerable Windows Server 2000 box.

01

About

Blue-team hardening lab on a deliberately vulnerable Windows Server 2000 box. Take a known-bad baseline, harden it against the era's common attack vectors (DNS zone transfers, unused IIS features, insecure remote-access stack, weak password policy), then re-run the same probes against the hardened box to confirm every exploit that worked before now failed.

Built as a Singapore Polytechnic security coursework lab.

02

Tools

  • Windows Server 2000 inside VMware Workstation for the lab environment.
  • IIS Lockdown Tool to strip unused IIS modules and reduce attack surface.
  • CopSSH (Cygwin-based OpenSSH on Windows) replacing the insecure remote-access stack.
  • Group Policy for password complexity, length, and lockout thresholds.
  • nmap, nslookup, and standard probing scripts for before-and-after validation.

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