Australian Signals Directorate Updates its Cyberthreat Mitigation Measures from “Top 4” to “Essential Eight”

Australian Signals Directorate(ASD) has developed eight cyber security steps to ensure protection against cyberattacks.

Australia: The Australian Signals Directorate, which is responsible for providing cyber security guidance to the government departments and agencies, has undertaken a significant step by expanding its ‘Top 4’ mitigation measures to ‘Essential Eight’. This strategy aims at protecting businesses from ransomware, malicious insiders, business email compromise, threats to industrial control systems and adversaries with damaging intentions, etc.

According to ASD, the Top 4 mitigation measures are capable of preventing at least 85% of the cyberattacks. These formed the cybersecurity baseline for all organisations. The new Essential Eight mitigation strategies, which also consist of the previous four, would now form the new baseline and would provide measures to prevent malware as well help in minimising the impact of cyber crime.

The Essential Eight are listed below:

1.    Application whitelisting (Top 4)

2.    Patch Application (Top 4)

3.    Disable Untrusted Microsoft Office macros.

4.    User application hardening

5.    Restrict administrative privileges (Top 4)

6.    Patch operating systems (Top 4)

7.    Multi-factor authentication

8.    Daily backup of important data

TechSci Research depicts that with such efforts being taken by governments all over the world for the prevention of intrusions, the increasing threat to cybersecurity would certainly see a downfall. With the growing adoption of cybersecurity principles to minimise the destructive effects of cybercrimes, the market of cybersecurity is expected to increase in coming years across the country and globally.

According to recently released report by TechSci Research, “Global Cyber Security Market By Security Type, By Solutions, By End Use Industry, By Region, Competition Forecast and Opportunities, 2011-2021”, global market for cyber security is projected to surpass US$ 137 billion by 2021. Growing trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), rising adoption of cloud computing, expanding market for Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to continue driving the cyber security market across the globe over the next five years. Though the global cyber security market is highly fragmented, Symantec Corporation emerged as the largest player in 2015, followed by BAE Systems PLC, Intel Corporation and Cisco Systems. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI); IT & Telecom; defense; energy & power; retail; and healthcare have emerged as the key application areas where cyber security solutions are being increasingly adopted.