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What is the Essential Eight Maturity Model?
The Essential Eight Maturity Model is designed to assist organisations in its implementation in a graduated manner based upon different levels of adversary tradecraft and targeting. The different maturity levels can also be used to provide a high-level indication of an organisation’s cyber security maturity.
Why should I implement the Essential Eight?
Implementing the Essential Eight proactively can be more cost-effective in terms of time, money and effort than having to respond to a large-scale cyber security incident.
Why update the Essential Eight Maturity Model?
The ACSC is committed to providing cyber security advice that is contemporary, contestable and actionable. This includes regular updates to the Essential Eight Maturity Model.
These are eight essential mitigation strategies from the Australian Cyber Security Center to mitigate cyber security Incidents as a baseline. This baseline, known as the Essential Eight, makes it much harder for adversaries to compromise systems.
The mitigation strategies that constitute the Essential Eight are:
The execution of executables, software libraries, scripts, installers, compiled HTML, HTML applications and control panel applets is prevented on workstations from within standard user profiles and temporary folders used by the operating system, web browsers and email clients.
Patches, updates or vendor mitigations for security vulnerabilities in internet-facing services are applied within two weeks of release, or within 48 hours if an exploit exists.
Microsoft Office macros are disabled for users that do not have a demonstrated business requirement.
Requests for privileged access to systems and applications are validated when first requested.
Web browsers do not process Java from the internet. Web browsers do not process web advertisements from the internet.
Patches, updates or vendor mitigations for security vulnerabilities in operating systems of workstations, servers and network devices are applied within one month of release.
Multi-factor authentication is used by an organisation's users if they authenticate to their organisation’s internet-facing services.
Backups of important data, software and configuration settings are performed and retained in a coordinated and resilient manner in accordance with business continuity requirements.