Essential Eight | Cyber.gov.au

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The Essential Eight is a series of baseline mitigation strategies taken from the Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents recommended for organisations. Implementing these strategies as a minimum makes it much harder for adversaries to compromise systems.

Essential Eight Explained

The Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents is a prioritised list of mitigation strategies to assist organisations in protecting their systems against a range of adversaries. The mitigation strategies can be customised based on each organisation’s risk profile and the adversaries they are most concerned about.

Essential Eight Maturity Model

The Essential Eight Maturity Model provides advice on how to implement the Essential Eight in a phased approach. It also assists organisations in self-assessing the maturity of their implementation.

Essential Eight to ISM Mapping

This document provides a mapping between Maturity Level 3 of the Essential Eight Maturity Model and the security controls within the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM). This mapping represents the minimum security controls organisations must implement to meet the intent of the Essential Eight.

Implementing Application Control

Application control is one of the most effective mitigation strategies in ensuring the security of systems. As such, application control forms part of the Essential Eight from the Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents. This document provides guidance on what application control is, what application control is not, and how to implement application control.

Assessing Security Vulnerabilities and Applying Patches

Applying patches to operating systems, applications and devices is critical to ensuring the security of systems. As such, patching forms part of the Essential Eight from the Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents.

Microsoft Office Macro Security

Microsoft Office applications can execute macros to automate routine tasks. However, macros can contain malicious code resulting in unauthorised access to sensitive information as part of a targeted cyber intrusion. This document has been developed to discuss approaches that can be applied by organisations to secure systems against malicious macros while balancing both their business and security requirements.

Restricting Administrative Privileges

This publication provides guidance on restricting the use of administrative privileges. Restricting the use of administrative privileges is one of the eight essential mitigation strategies from the Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents.

Implementing Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication is one of the most effective controls an organisation can implement to prevent an adversary from gaining access to a device or network and accessing sensitive information. When implemented correctly, multi-factor authentication can make it significantly more difficult for an adversary to steal legitimate credentials to facilitate further malicious activities on a network. Due to its effectiveness, multi-factor authentication is one of the Essential Eight from the Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents.

Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents – Mitigation Details

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has developed prioritised mitigation strategies to help cyber security professionals in all organisations mitigate cyber security incidents caused by various cyber threats. This guidance addresses targeted cyber intrusions (i.e. those executed by advanced persistent threats such as foreign intelligence services), ransomware and external adversaries with destructive intent, malicious insiders, ‘business email compromise’, and industrial control systems.