Part 4: Hardening and Best Practices

This part converts a working setup into a resilient long-term deployment.

1. Security Baseline Profile

Recommended baseline for production-style usage:

• suspicious_js_level = balanced
• critical_secrets_only_alerts = true
• phishing/secrets/malware notification channels enabled
• auto-update enabled for both uBlock and phishing feeds

For higher-risk environments, test strict JS mode carefully before broad rollout.

2. Whitelist Governance

Whitelist entries should be treated as security exceptions.

Minimum metadata per entry:

• domain
• owner
• reason
• date added
• review date

Governance rules:

• no broad wildcard behavior
• periodic cleanup of stale entries
• require business sign-off for long-lived exceptions

3. Feed Hygiene and Drift Control

Protection quality depends on feed freshness.

Practices:

• monitor source update timestamps weekly
• run manual update before critical demos/reviews
• investigate repeated source failures immediately

4. Data Protection and Forensics Readiness

Local data paths contain valuable evidence and sensitive context:

• data/settings.json
• data/url_monitor.db
• filter files under data/filters/

Hardening actions:

• restrict filesystem access
• back up before major upgrades
• sanitize exports before external sharing

5. Build and Release Hardening

Before release, validate:

1. full test suite pass
2. strict docs build pass
3. monitor/proxy lifecycle on target OS
4. certificate flow on clean profile
5. artifact checksums

Prefer consolidated release pipeline management to avoid workflow drift.

6. Operational Drill Program

Run periodic drills for:

• phishing event handling
• secret leakage detection workflow
• proxy misconfiguration recovery
• feed-update outage response

Measure:

• time to detect
• time to triage
• time to recover

7. Contributor Hardening Rules

When changing runtime logic:

• update docs in same PR
• add tests for lifecycle coupling changes
• avoid introducing ambiguous alert labels

When changing feed sources:

• update config and feeds reference page together

8. Completion and Next Steps

You now have:

• a validated installation
• controlled filter operations
• incident playbooks
• hardening baseline

Continue with deeper docs:

• Explanation
• Reference