This is a summary of the UK Government 10 step plan for Cyber Essentials, which is designed for organisations looking to protect themselves in cyberspace.
1. Risk Management
Embed an appropriate risk management regime across the organisation. This should be supported by an empowered governance structure, which is actively supported by the board and senior managers. These should aim to ensure that all employees, contractors and suppliers are aware of the approach, how decisions are made, and any applicable risk boundaries.
2. Secure Configuration
Identify baseline technology builds and processes for ensuring configuration management can greatly improve the security of systems. Develop a strategy to remove or disable unnecessary functionality from systems, and to quickly fix known vulnerabilities.
3. Network Security
The connections from your networks to the Internet, and other partner networks, expose your systems and technologies to attack. By creating and implementing some simple policies and appropriate architectural and technical responses, you can reduce the chances of these attacks succeeding. Your organisation’s networks may use of mobile or remote working, and cloud services, makes defining a fixed network boundary difficult.
4. Managing User Privileges
All users should be provided with a reasonable (but minimal) level of system privileges and rights needed for their role. The granting of highly elevated system privileges should be carefully controlled and managed.
5. User Education and Awareness
It’s important that security rules and the technology provided enable users to do their job as well as help keep the organisation secure. This can be supported by a systematic delivery of awareness programmes and training that deliver security expertise as well as helping to establish a security-conscious culture.
6. Incident Management
Invest in establishing effective incident management policies and processes to help to improve resilience, support business continuity, improve customer and stakeholder confidence and potentially reduce any impact.
7. Malware Prevention
Malicious software, or malware is an umbrella term to cover any code or content that could have a malicious, undesirable impact on systems. The risk may be reduced by developing and implementing appropriate anti-malware policies as part of an overall ‘defence in depth’ approach.
8. Monitoring
System monitoring provides a capability that aims to detect actual or attempted attacks on systems and business services. Monitoring allows you to ensure that systems are being used appropriately in accordance with organisational policies.
9. Removable Media Controls
Removable media provide a common route for the introduction of malware and the accidental or deliberate export of sensitive data. You should be clear about the business need to use removable media and apply appropriate security controls to its use.
10.Home and Mobile Working
Mobile working and remote system access offers great benefits, but exposes new risks that need to be managed. You should establish risk based policies and procedures that support mobile working or remote access to systems that are applicable to users, as well as service providers.
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/10-steps-cyber-security has further information.
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