The Challenges of Cyber Essentials Audit and Compliance Activities

It’s “only” essential but it can be bloody difficult!
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Cyber Essentials Areas

Cyber Essentials is a minimum baseline standard for ensuring foundational cyber security considerations and controls are in place. It’s a good starting point, but by no means should it be “THE GOAL” and just because it has “Essentials” in its name, don’t think it’s easy to comply with. Whilst the standard isn’t outlandish with its requirements in the main, the reality between technical capabilities and being able to discover, audit and remediate security configurations in organisations is often nowhere near as simple as someone may tell you. The news here is that the standard has been extended to include some wider areas.

Education

Stop rushing for “the solution”!

Before you start solutioning

Everyone these days seems to rush towards “the solution”, well as someone who now has few years under their belt, I’d advise people slow down a little and think about their business requirements, outcomes, current state, and constraints. Significantly as well think about how a service will run over a period, not just how to buy it and “fling it into production”.

Defense

Snake Oil Defence: Defending against lies and false claims

Defenders of the Realm

We often talk about not selling using fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). It is quite a big thing in the cyber security industry where the entire purpose of existence is to help people and organisations manage risk to prevent, detect and respond to impact to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. A key foundational component is that we operate using science, trust, and integrity.

This does however become quite interesting when you look at some rather dubious sales and marketing techniques employed by a few.

What I have noticed are there are a range of patterns that are similar (it is like they all went on the same con artist course!) so I thought I would look at some of the indicators I see which bring up flags to me. Read more “Snake Oil Defence: Defending against lies and false claims” →