Essential 8 Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents

The essential 8 expand upon the ‘Top 4’ mitigation strategies, part of the government’s Protective Security Policy Framework, which has been mandatory for federal agencies since 2014. ASD had stated that implementing the top 4 mitigation strategies will be able to prevent over 85% of unauthorised intrusions.

What’s the purpose of Essential 8?

The essential 8 mitigation strategies have been developed to protect your data, applications and users by keeping adversaries from inserting malware into your network to minimise the impact of incidents and data loss. Malware – viruses, worms, ransomware, spyware and more – can compromise or exfiltrate data, disrupt operations or propagate into connected networks. It can cause operational disruptions, loss of critical or sensitive data and unwanted publicity. And that can be expensive. According to the EMC Global Data Protection Index, data loss and downtime cost Australian businesses AUD $65.5 billion in 2014. These mitigation strategies can help you avoid malware infections and their associated costs.

Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) ‘Essential 8’ strategies.

The Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) ‘Essential 8’ strategies to mitigate cyber security incidents represent a set of cyber security best practices that, when implemented successfully, will provide your agency, with a baseline cyber security posture.

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Essential 8 Tips from Macquarie Government

"The eight strategies will help protect businesses from ransomware, malicious insiders, business email compromise, threats to industrial control systems and adversaries with destructive intent."

Dan Tehan

the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Cyber Security

Why the essential 8?

Why another set of guidelines? There are any number of cyber security approaches that can secure networks. These essential 8 mitigation strategies have been developed specifically to provide Australian government agencies with a baseline of security operations that, if implemented and tied together, can protect
networks, users, applications and data from all but the most persistent threats. The following points illustrate why these mitigation strategies make sense.

Defence in Depth.

These strategies are designed to work together. Individually they are all powerful tools to protect individual components and operations of your network. Together they represent a multi-level approach that provides comprehensive protection, even if adversaries do manage to break one of the defensive measures.

Accessible to All.

None of these strategies is ‘state-of-the-art’ nor bleeding edge. They are all tried and true. There is virtually no risk in adopting these strategies if implemented correctly. Indeed, performing back-ups for important data has been an essential rule for IT managers since day one. The real benefit of the ASD Essential 8 is that they provide a baseline cyber security posture and provide a quantifiable benchmark to meet ASD recommendations.

Cost-effective.

The essential eight strategies can go a long way into protecting your agencies from security breaches and potentially damaging malware for a comparatively modest financial investment. While implementing these strategies will entail an investment of staff time and possible hardware/software upgrades, the costs involved will be considerably lower than cleaning up in the wake of a compromise.

Deployment.

Whilst your agency can implement these mitigation strategies in an ad hoc manner, basing your security posture on a single comprehensive framework has many benefits. With a comprehensive security fabric, you would be able to manage most of the strategies – such as whitelisting, patching, admin privileges – from a centralised console. Additionally, you’ll be able to apply consistent and appropriate enforcement of policy across all users, applications and devices whether on premise, remote, cloud or hybrid cloud.

Automation.

Many of these mitigation strategies can be automated to reduce management overheads whilst ensuring compliance. Most security solutions can be set up with thresholds and alerts to monitor network traffic so that any anomalous activity can be quickly identified and investigated. Massive unauthorised downloads, such as the Panama Papers leak, wouldn’t have happened with the right mitigation strategies in place.

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‘Essential 8’ strategies to mitigate cyber security incidents.