lobal cybersecurity spending is projected to reach $87 billion by the end of 2024, as organizations continue to invest heavily in protecting their digital assets. Despite this, headline-grabbing breaches continue to occur with alarming frequency. What are they missing?
Contrary to popular belief, the answer doesn’t lie in the latest framework or a cutting-edge tool. Instead, it’s about getting back to the basics and building security from the ground up.
Enter cyber hygiene.
Cyber hygiene practices are not flashy but incredibly effective at preventing common threats and creating a solid foundation for more advanced defenses.
This post will explore why cyber hygiene is important, its components, and the best practices you should follow.
Enterprise Security for AI Agents & Non-Human Identities
What is cyber hygiene?
To help you grasp the importance of this concept, let’s start with a clear cyber hygiene definition. At its core, cyber hygiene encompasses the essential practices that keep your digital infrastructure secure. Think of it as the online equivalent of personal hygiene—those routine actions that, when performed consistently, significantly reduce your risk of threats. Notably, cyber hygiene is a proactive, ongoing process. It involves:
- Implementing basic security measures like regular software updates, strong password policies, access control management, and more
- Maintaining these measures over time
- Evolving your approach as new threats emerge
A crucial aspect of cyber hygiene often overlooked is managing non-human identities (NHIs). These include machine identities, service accounts, and API keys that applications and services use to interact with each other. Modern security platforms like Entro can help organizations maintain good cyber hygiene by efficiently managing these NHIs and their associated secrets, addressing a critical but often neglected area of cybersecurity.
To fully understand the scope of cyber hygiene and how it encompasses both human and non-human elements, let’s break it down into its core components.
5 components of cyber hygiene
To ensure good cyber hygiene, security teams need to implement best practices across the following core components:
1. Hardware and software assets
Hardware and software assets include devices, systems, and applications. Keeping track of these assets helps with comprehensive inventory management and timely patching. An example of cyber hygiene best practice for this component would be regularly updating asset databases to track new software installations.
2. Networks
Networks cover routers, LANs, firewalls, VPNs, cloud connections, and all elements that facilitate data transmission and connectivity. They are essential for segmenting sensitive areas and managing traffic efficiently. Implementing strict firewall rules to control data flow between network segments is an example of best practice in this area.
3. Data
Data represents the organization’s information assets. It’s central to data classification and protection efforts. A best practice example for this component is applying encryption to sensitive data both at rest and in transit to ensure information remains secure throughout its lifecycle.
4. Users and identities
Users and identities encompass all entities interacting with organizational systems and data, including human users and non-human identities like service accounts and APIs. An example of best practice is implementing automated rotation of API keys and service account credentials to minimize the damage even when a credential is compromised.
5. Security tools and controls
Security tools and controls comprise technical defenses and monitoring capabilities essential for threat detection and response. Regular updates and proper configuration of these tools are key to maintaining strong cyber hygiene.
Importance of cyber hygiene for organizations
Poor cyber hygiene increases the chances of attacks and insider threats. So, cyber hygiene is not just helpful but also a necessity for organizations of all sizes. Here are the essential benefits of good cyber hygiene:
- Prevention: Good cyber hygiene stops many common attacks before they start. It’s like locking your doors—a simple action that prevents opportunistic threats.
- Cost-effectiveness: Implementing basic hygiene practices is far cheaper than dealing with breaches. It’s a low-cost, high-impact approach to security.
- Compliance: Many regulations require organizations to follow basic security measures. Strong cyber hygiene helps meet these requirements, avoiding fines and legal issues.
- Operational efficiency: Cyber hygiene ensures all the systems perform to their peak capabilities. This results in less downtime, higher productivity, and improved user experience
- Threat visibility: Anomalies stand out more clearly when basic cyber hygiene is in place. This helps security teams spot real threats faster.
- Foundation for advanced security: You can’t build a fortress on sand. Good hygiene creates the solid base you need for implementing sophisticated security measures.
- Stakeholder confidence: When you have cyber hygiene best practices in place, your investors, customers, and partners trust you more.
What are the common challenges in cyber hygiene?
Despite the basic nature of cyber hygiene practices, organizations sometimes struggle to implement them effectively. Here are the major challenges in ensuring good cyber hygiene across an organization:
- Growing complexity: The growing network of cloud services, IoT devices, and remote workstations makes it difficult for security teams to track and apply consistent security measures across the board.
- Misplaced resources: Many organizations spend a lot on advanced security tools but skimp on basic practices. Critical tasks like regular updates, access checks, secrets management, etc. get ignored in such scenarios.
- Lack of user buy-in: Some employees may see security measures as barriers to their work or as unnecessary rules. This lack of buy-in can lead to shortcuts, policy violations, and a weakened security culture, even if you have well-designed hygiene programs.
- Operational disconnect: Many companies fail to make cyber hygiene a natural part of their daily operations because security often remains separate from other business processes.
Cyber hygiene best practices: Practical CIS controls for organizations
The CIS Controls are a set of 18 safeguards to prevent cyber-attacks. They are developed by cybersecurity experts worldwide, drawing from real-world experiences and data. These controls make up the best practices for cyber hygiene for organizations of all sizes and security maturity levels.
Source: Centre for Internet Security (CIS)
Here’s an overview of all 18 CIS Controls:
1. Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets
Make and maintain a list of all devices on your company’s network. Keep it up to date. You can only protect what you know about.
2. Inventory and Control of Software Assets
Make and maintain a list of all software used in your company. Stop unauthorized software from running by only allowing approved programs.
3. Data Protection
Store and manage your data based on how sensitive it is and implement appropriate protection measures. Ensure the data is encrypted at all times – at rest and in transit.
4. Secure Configuration of Enterprise Assets and Software
Create foolproof configuration standards, audit regularly, and update as threats evolve.
5. Account Management
Ensure robust authentication for all accounts, especially privileged ones and those used by non-human identities like applications and services. Entro helps manage non-human identity security effectively, ensuring that service accounts, APIs, and other machine identities are properly secured and rotated.
6. Access Control Management
Apply the principle of least privilege—grant only necessary access rights to all entities, whether human users or automated services. Check and update access rights often to control your data and systems tightly.
7. Continuous Vulnerability Management
Regularly check your network and systems for weak spots. Prioritize fixing them based on risk, focusing on those most likely to be exploited by attackers.
8. Audit Log Management
Turn on logging for all systems and network devices to maintain visibility into your environment. Check these logs often for suspicious activities to detect threats early.
9. Email and Web Browser Protections
Use spam filters and anti-phishing tools to protect against common attacks. Keep browsers and email programs updated to patch known vulnerabilities.
10. Malware Defenses
Install and maintain anti-malware software on all systems. Use application controls to stop malware from running, adding extra protection against harmful software.
11. Data Recovery
Set up and maintain activities to recover data and restore important company assets to a trusted, pre-incident state.
12. Network Infrastructure Management
Set up and actively manage network devices to stop attackers from using weak network services and access points.
13. Network Monitoring and Defense
Use tools and processes to set up network monitoring and defense against security threats across the organization’s network.
14. Security Awareness and Skills Training
Launch an awareness program to help the workforce be security conscious and properly skilled to reduce cybersecurity risks.
15. Service Provider Management
Create a process to assess service providers with sensitive data or manage important IT systems. Make sure these providers are protecting those systems and data properly.
16. Application Software Security
Manage the security of all in-house and bought software throughout its life to prevent, detect, and fix security weaknesses before they harm the company. Consider integrating Entro into your development lifecycle to avoid hardcoded secrets and credentials and ensure secure storage of sensitive information.
17. Incident Response Management
Create a program to prepare for, detect, and respond to an attack with an incident response plan.
18. Penetration Testing
Test how resilient and reliable the company assets are with simulated attacks. These attacks help identify vulnerabilities in processes and tools.
To ensure good cyber hygiene, compare your organization’s current practices to these controls. Then, decide which ones to put in place first based on your company’s risks and resources. This will help you improve your overall cybersecurity step by step.
How to measure cyber hygiene?
Let’s say your teams have begun investing time and resources to maintain good cyber hygiene. But how do you track the progress of these efforts? For cyber hygiene assessment, track these seven metrics:
- Asset inventory completeness: Percentage of devices accurately recorded in CMDB
- Anti-malware coverage: Proportion of assets with up-to-date anti-malware protection
- Privileged account count: Number of permanent high-access accounts for both human and non-human identities (lower is better)
- Authentication strength: Percentage of accounts (including service accounts) using strong authentication methods
- Patch management: Critical/high vulnerabilities patched within 7 days
- Permitted program control: Extent of application whitelisting implementation
- Data security: Encryption and backup status of critical assets
A quick cyber hygiene checklist
- Maintain accurate inventory of all devices and software
- Regularly audit and update CMDB
- Implement the least privilege principle
- Review and minimize permanent privileged accounts
- Enable strong authentication across all systems and services
- Establish processes to patch critical vulnerabilities within 7 days
- Automate patch deployment where possible
- Deploy and maintain up-to-date anti-malware tools on all endpoints
- Implement email and web filtering
- Identify and classify critical data assets
- Encrypt sensitive data at rest and in transit
- Implement and test regular backup procedures
- Segment networks and implement firewalls
- Monitor and log network traffic
- Implement application whitelisting
- Restrict the ability to install unauthorized software
- Conduct regular employee training on cybersecurity best practices
- Test effectiveness through simulated phishing exercises
- Develop and regularly test incident response plan
Cyber hygiene is the foundation of cybersecurity. If you consistently implement these fundamental practices, you can reduce your organization’s risk exposure and pave the way for more advanced security measures.
To see how Entro can enhance your organization’s cyber hygiene practices, particularly in managing non-human identities and secrets, sign up for a quick demo today
