 This episode was brought to you by Tripwire. Today we ask the question, is your system hard enough? Now we all hear about the importance of system hardening. A hardened system, what is it? Is it something out of a Guy Ritchie movie? No, not quite. Think of your production environment as a war zone. Now you wouldn't send your common soft civilian in there. No, you want to send your hardened battle ready soldiers. Which is a bit like system hardening. And if you decide not to harden your system and throw it into the production environment and once it gets owned, you'll be asked the same question that Tupac was asking so many years ago. Why don't you send a bad boy to play a grown man's game? So, what does this involve? Well, it's pretty simple. All you do is you just simply turn off all the things that you don't need. This, you will find, is the second most secure computer on the planet. We've removed the mouse, painted the screen black, we've turned off the whole Wi-Fi, turned down the hi-fi, we've bulletproofed the whole case just in case of a drive-by. Removed all the insecure letters, got rid of the power cable, ditched the battery, broke the connection with the printer, removed the VGA port, took out the HDMI. All of this which makes this computer virtually impossible to use, but perfectly secure. Right, and you say this is the second most secure device we have? Yes, this here is the most secure one in the world. What's this? Inside here is an iPad. Okay, so maybe you don't want to turn off all your services, make it completely unusable, but you do want to shut down anything that's unnecessary, therefore making the attack surface as small as possible. For example, when I go out on the motorbike, I wear something like this. What is this doing? It's doing the same thing. It's a hard shell, it's shut down all the bits that aren't needed, and therefore making the vulnerable area a lot smaller than had I not been doing it. Therefore increasing the chances that I'd preserve my dangerously good looks should anything happen. And you should think of doing the same to your network. Stay secure, my friends.