69.41 (L1) Ensure 'World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC)' is set to 'Disabled' or 'Not Installed'

Information

Provides Web connectivity and administration through the Internet Information Services Manager.

The recommended state for this setting is: Disabled or Not Installed

Note: This service is not installed by default. It is supplied with Windows, but is installed by enabling an optional Windows feature (

Internet Information Services - World Wide Web Services

).

Note #2: An organization may choose to selectively grant exceptions to web developers to allow IIS (or another web server) on their workstation, in order for them to locally test & develop web pages. However, the organization should track those machines and ensure the security controls and mitigations are kept up to date, to reduce risk of compromise.

Hosting a website from a workstation is an increased security risk, as the attack surface of that workstation is then greatly increased. If proper security mitigations are not followed, the chance of successful attack increases significantly.

Note: This security concern applies to

any

web server application installed on a workstation, not just IIS.

Solution

To establish the recommended configuration, set the following Custom Configuration Policy to 4 or confirm that the service is Not installed :

Name: <Enter name>
Description: <Enter Description>
OMA-URI: ./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/SystemServices/ConfigureWorldWideWebPublishingServiceStartupMode
Data Type: Integer
Value: 4

Note: As of January 2024, despite its inclusion in Microsoft's official documentation, using an OMI-URI to configure a Windows Service Startup Mode via a custom profile will lead to an error in Intune. This error will be logged in the local event log as 'The system cannot find the file specified.' Currently, the most reliable method for remediation is through PowerShell.

The recommended configuration can also be established via PowerShell by running the following cmdlet:

Set-Service -Name W3SVC -StartupType Disabled

Impact:

IIS Web Services will not function.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/16852

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-6, 800-53|CM-7, CSCv7|9.2

Plugin: Windows

Control ID: 440f675f8199835371f222f97c20ef9db32318427d0f17b26c3ac35259efaa7b