The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight

In today’s digital landscape, cyber threats have become an unfortunate reality for businesses of all sizes. 3rdmill understands the critical importance of protecting your organization from cyber attacks and securing your sensitive data, which is why we’ve been evolving our Essential Eight benchmarking review to align our customers to best practice.

Firstly, what is the Essential Eight?

The Essential Eight is a comprehensive cyber-security framework developed by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC). It represents a set of essential mitigation strategies that, when implemented effectively, can significantly reduce the risk of a successful cyber attack. The framework covers a wide range of areas, including application whitelisting, patch management, disabling untrusted Microsoft Office macros, user application hardening, restricting administrative privileges, patching operating systems, multi-factor authentication, and daily backups.

How it affects you

While cyber attacks on enterprises such as Medibank and Optus often make the headlines, small-to-medium businesses are equally at risk.  A staggering 62% of SMBs reported experiencing a cyber attack in the recent survey conducted by the ACSC. The consequences of a successful attack can be devastating, leading to financial losses, reputation damage, and legal repercussions.

This is why the Essential Eight has been developed – by implementing these strategies, you can significantly enhance your organization’s resilience against cyber threats.

How you can adopt this framework

The first thing to understand is what Maturity Level your organisation sits at. The framework understands not all SMBs have the same security requirements, so it has created four Maturity Levels which you can benchmark your organisation against.

Australian Cyber Security Centre Maturity Model Explained

The next step is to assess how your organisation is performing against the desired Maturity Level. This is where we can help – our in-house cyber security experts have developed a streamlined review process that can help you identify potential gaps in your defenses, and provide tailored recommendations to align your security measures with the Essential Eight strategies.

So, what next?

Don’t wait for a cyber incident to occur before taking action. Take charge of your organization’s cyber security and contact us to schedule your review today. Together, let’s make cybersecurity an integral part of your business success story.

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