What is the Essential 8 and Why Should You be Interested?

What is the Essential 8?

The Essential Eight is a baseline set of mitigation strategies that have been developed by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC). These mitigation strategies have been developed by the ACSC to help organisations protect themselves against various cyber threats regardless of their industry.

1. Application Control

2. Application Patching

3. Configure Microsoft Office Macro Settings

4. User Application Hardening

5. Restrict Administrative Privileges

6. Patch Operating Systems

7. Multi-factor authentication

8. Daily Backups

While implementation of the Essential Eight does not guarantee against cyber attacks, it significantly reduces your organisation’s attack surface, the risk of being compromised, and your ability to successfully recover/continue business if you are attacked.

Why the Essential 8?

As COVID-19 has changed the landscape of organisations, increasing the number of remote workers, cyber attacks have also evolved to target businesses through differing mechanisms. In an effort to protect your organisation, the Essential 8 allows you to implement a cyber threat management strategy and maturity journey. Implementing the Essential 8 is a journey. It allows for quick improvements of your overall cyber security, while giving a clear roadmap to long term improvements.

How will Acurus help you achieve compliance?

Leveraging our extensive cyber security experience, Acurus will significantly improve your organisation’s cyber threat management capabilities. Partnering with leading technology vendors like Microsoft, Fortinet and Tanium, Acurus can perform a comprehensive cyber security gap assessment, and create a plan unique to your business to address each area of the Essential 8.

Utilising features from our partners Acurus can quickly and efficiently:

  • Align your endpoints to a common security standard, facilitating User Application hardening and restricting administration privileges
  • Enable Application Control and Patching, including managing office macro settings
  • Remove unwanted 3rd party applications
  • Perform vulnerability scanning
  • Detect unmanaged endpoints
  • Efficiently patch operating systems

Acurus will help you to create a unified solution, which meets all needs of the Essential 8, while also simplifying endpoint management, allowing them to be viewed and managed from a single dashboard, maximising your resources and driving down your 3rd party software exposures.

If you’d like help with developing or implementing your essential 8 strategy contact us on 1300 119 561 or let us contact you by expressing your interest below.

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