We are pleased to announce that Metafour has passed the Cyber Essentials assessment. Cyber Essentials aims to help organisations implement basic levels of protection against cyber attacks. This is just one step Metafour has taken in our commitment to taking cyber security seriously and keeping our customers’ systems safe.
What is Cyber Essentials?
The government has worked with the Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprises (IASME) consortium and the Information Security Forum (ISF) to develop Cyber Essentials, a set of basic technical controls for organisations to use. Cyber Essentials is an independently verified self-assessment, measured against five basic security controls and a qualified assessor verifies the information provided.
The five basic controls within Cyber Essentials were chosen because, when properly implemented, they will help to protect against Internet-based attackers using commodity capabilities – which are freely available on the internet.
Cyber Essentials covers the following key controls:
- Secure configuration – By ensuring your computers and network devices are configured properly, you can identify systems or databases that you no longer need or use. You will have the opportunity to reduce your overall storage and bandwidth consumption, as well as reducing the level of inherent security vulnerabilities.
- Boundary firewalls and Internet gateways – Using boundary firewalls to monitor traffic to your server(s) enables you to better understand and manage your bandwidth requirements, potentially allowing you to renegotiate your hosting costs, as well as blocking attackers and external threats.
- Access control and administrative privilege management – Managing access control and administrative privileges erodes the opportunity for staff to install time-wasting software on to their computers, as well as removing the insider threat.
- Patch management – Keeping on top of software patching and licencing makes your company more productive, as well as more secure. Patches often improve the performance of the products they apply to, and remove issues that slow down employees, such as crashes and poor performance caused by congested networks.
- Malware protection – Implementing appropriate malware protection has its obvious security advantages, but an often overlooked hidden benefit is the time and cost savings that result from avoiding devices being out of action.
For more information about cyber essentials, visit the government website here
