Security Configuration Guidance, National Security Agency

The National Security Agency has created a guide for securely configuring Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 operating system. The guide is available to all government organizations at no cost. Because a single unprotected computer in a sensitive location could be used to breach others, NSA officials hope the guide will diminish security risks throughout government.

"The guide configures the thousands of technical settings that determine things like permissions, computer access and where files are located," says Tony Sager, chief of the NSA's Systems and Network Attack Center. The guide can be installed on computers using Windows 2000, and automatically works to secure the system. "We needed to make it as automatic as possible," Sager says.

Recent network worms such as Code Red, Code Red II and Nimda would not have affected users who had loaded the guide onto their computers. The guide can be downloaded from NSA's Web site at www.nsa.gov.