CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

1.2. Understanding Physical Security

You should implement security in many places, and one of the most overlooked areas is physical security. Physical security has nothing to do with software; rather, it covers how you protect your environment and systems by making sure that a person cannot physically access the system. For example, many companies use a numeric keypad to secure entrance to a facility. To get into the facility, users must enter a valid combination to open the door.

Another example of physical security is the server room. Most server room doors are locked with a numeric padlock or a key. Higher-security server rooms sometimes even require fingerprint or retinal scans from anyone trying to enter the room. The benefit of locking your servers in the server room is a hacker cannot boot off a bootable CD-ROM, which could bypass the OS entirely. After a hacker bypasses the OS, he typically can bypass a lot of the security by booting to a totally different OS.

You can apply enterprise security best practices to your home systems. For example, to help secure your home system, you might want to prevent booting from a CD-ROM so that an unauthorized person cannot try to bypass your Windows security.

1.2.1. BIOS settings

You can set a number of settings in your system BIOS to help control the security of the system. Be sure to investigate the BIOS settings on your system to ...