Managing vulnerabilities exposed by Windows services.

The intent of this document is to identify the vulnerabilities exposed by the Windows services, and to learn how to secure 'The House of Windows' from these vulnerabilities. For the purposes of our discussion we will be primarily focusing on the Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 operating systems. As the newest of the Microsoft 'business' class operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000 have the widest variety of tools and available settings to manipulate a service into an exposure. That is not to say that much of what we discuss will not apply to older Microsoft operating systems as well (Windows NT 4.0) as much of what we will discuss is backwards compatible and some historical perspective is required. To fully examine the impacts generated by vulnerabilities in a Windows service we will be taking a look at what makes up a Windows service the risks posed by the Windows services how these risks occur tools for manipulating Windows services and finally we will review the solutions and resolutions to these vulnerabilities.