Essential 8

What is the Essential 8?

The Essential Eight is a set of recommendations developed by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to help organisations protect themselves against various cyber threats.

The eight selected elements allow you to implement a relatively simple and achievable cyber-resilience strategy. Additionally, the eight elements have four levels of "depth" to which a business might take them, called "maturity models".

With decades of experience in this area, Cyberwise can mentor and guide you step-by-step through the ratification process, including consulting, assessment, implementation and ongoing support.

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The Essential 8 Elements Explained:

Application Control

This item refers to ensuring your business has a "whitelist" and a blacklist" of allowed / disallowed apps and software within the organisation. This greatly reduces your risk of malware infection by reducing the number of possible "infectable" apps.

Application Patching

This item refers to the "patching" of your applications, that is, the applying of regular updates. As your trusted IT service provider, we automate this process and send you regular progress reports.

Microsoft Macro Settings

a "macro" is a program or written procedure stored inside a Microsoft Office document, such as a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. Macro's can be written with instructions to do malicious things, so it's important to restrict their ability to run unless deemed absolutely safe.

Application Hardening

This refers to the "hardening" or tightening of applications installed on your machine, ensuring they remain "stock standard" as possible, to avoid possible risks due to vulnerable or dodgy "extra add-ons" for certain apps.

Restricting Admin Privileges

Ensure a minimum number of people have access to make "global" changes in your network. this ensures a minimum number of attack points for criminals trying to gain "unlimited" access to sensitive data by stealing staff passwords

Patching Operating Systems

Just as applications need regular patching, so do the operating systems of your actual computer. Just as for application patching, we automate this process on behalf of our clients and their computers.

Multi-factor Authentication

This one is probably very well known by now. It is perhaps one of the most important (albeit frustrating) things you can do to protect the credentials of your users and their accounts. Users must provide "Double proof" of their authenticity by way of answering an alert on a separate device during a login attempt to a site or application or computer.

Regular Backups

This one needs no introduction and should have been well known even before cyber security became a buzzword. Backups these days should be regular, automated and preferably cloud-based, physically at arm's length from the network.

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The Maturity Levels Explained:

So you might take cyber hygiene "quite seriously" but how serious is "quite"?? How is it measured?

Maturity levels take the E8 principles to a depth and seriousness that ranges from 0 (not very) to 4 (extreme!)

Are you serious about ensuring your business processes and operations fit within the Essential 8 framework? then contact us today for a free non-obligation assessment of your situation, your goals and objectives.

Level 0

You follow E8 principles, but very loosely, to the point that any criminal with a very basic skillset could pose a risk to your business continuity.

Level 1