Microsoft® Windows® Security Resource Kit, Second Edition

Best Practices

• Use security templates properly. Never edit the built-in security templates, especially templates such as Setup Security.inf, which gives you the option to reapply the default security settings. Instead of just modifying a predefined template, customize the predefined template and then save the changes under a different template name.

• Monitor the size of security templates when using Group Policy. Security templates can become very large if many settings are made, especially file and registry ACLs. For example, the Setup Security.inf template is 770 KB. Security templates this large could cause network performance degradation when applied by using Group Policy.

• Create templates for specific computer roles. Because security templates ...