Hexicor
Essential 8
The Essential 8 is a set of cybersecurity mitigation strategies designed to provide a baseline security posture for organisations, helping them protect against a range of cyber threats. The strategies are categorised into three maturity levels, allowing organisations to progressively enhance their cybersecurity defences.
The Essential 8: Ensuring Your Business' Safety with Hexicor's Advanced Cyber Security Solutions
In an era where cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, adopting a proactive and comprehensive approach to cybersecurity is crucial for organisations of all sizes. The Essential 8 framework, developed by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), offers a strategic suite of security controls that organisations can implement to significantly reduce the risk of cyber incidents.
Hexicor Cyber Security’s services are perfectly aligned with the Essential 8, ensuring that our clients not only understand these critical controls but also effectively implement and manage them to safeguard their digital assets.
Understanding the Essential 8 critical controls
Application control is critical in preventing unapproved or malicious software from executing, thus mitigating the risk of malware infections. It ensures that only trusted applications are allowed to run, significantly reducing the attack surface.
Regularly updating applications is vital to fixing security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. Keeping applications up-to-date mitigates the risk of security breaches through known vulnerabilities.
Malicious macros in Office documents are a common attack vector. Restricting the use of macros from untrusted sources helps prevent malware infections.
Hardening user applications involves configuring web browsers and other applications to minimise the attack surface by disabling unnecessary features that could be exploited by attackers, such as Flash and Java in browsers.
Limiting administrative privileges to those who really need them reduces the risk of malware propagation and data breaches. It ensures that even if an account is compromised, the impact is minimised.
Like application patching, updating operating systems promptly is crucial to protecting against vulnerabilities. Many cyber-attacks exploit unpatched systems.
MFA adds an extra layer of security, making it harder for attackers to gain unauthorised access even if they have obtained user credentials.
Regular backups ensure data integrity and availability, crucial for recovery in the event of a cyber-attack, such as ransomware, or data loss.
Why is Essential 8 important to businesses today
Essential 8 is becoming the base level of Information Security for all industries in Australia.
- The Essential 8 Framework is endorsed and recognised nationally.
- The Essential 8 is a set of government-recommended cybersecurity mitigation strategies.
- Government agencies received a recommendation to align with Essential 8 from July 2022.
- Essential 8 is mandated for all Commonwealth Government non-corporate entities, local councils, and universities.
- Government-funded, not-for-profit organisations must manage systems in line with Essential 8.
The Benefits for Organisations
