Essential Eight: Achieving Maturity through Actionability
What is Essential Eight?
Essential Eight refers to the set of mitigation strategies developed by the Australian Signals Directorate. It provides a baseline of security controls that, when implemented, aim to protect an organization’s systems against a wide variety of cybersecurity threats, including ransomware, insider threats, and targeted attacks. The ASD has recommended that, while no set of mitigation strategies is guaranteed to prevent an attack, the strategies proposed in Essential Eight are a highly recommended baseline to start from.
Presently, organizations use point solutions and often rely on manual-intensive efforts to gauge their maturity against Essential Eight. Ultimately, this leads to inaccuracies, overly optimistic scoring, and lost productivity in the process of reconciling between the multitude of datasets required to gauge compliance. The manual/point-solution approach leads to a few key challenges:
Incomplete Visibility and Asset Management—No single agent is ever fully deployed 100% across an environment, causing organizations to struggle to gain a full understanding of their attack surface, which is constantly evolving with the rise of hybrid infrastructure, remote devices, BYOD, and multi-cloud environments.
Legacy Systems—Many organizations still leverage legacy hardware and software that cannot be easily updated. Understanding what stage of support all your devices are in is a constant challenge that has only become more complex.
Resourcing—Assessing your maturity against Essential 8 is a daunting task, with a myriad of systems required to speak the same language to give you what you need. On top of day-to-day efforts, with teams already stretched, resource crunches become a limiting factor when trying to manually review your controls and maturity.
Essential Eight and Axonius
In order to best gauge how Axonius can help with Essential Eight, we have provided a breakdown below identifying the eight key areas of Essential Eight, a summary of what each area seeks to cover, and how Axonius can help.
Essential Eight Area | Description | How Axonius Can Help |
|---|---|---|
Application Control | Application control centers around the governance over the execution of scripts, executables, installers, etc., on any device within your organisation’s environment and is frequently enforced through Group Policies (using GPOs) or via endpoint agents (such as Windows Defender ATP). | Using Axonius, you can rapidly assess application control monitoring state using simple queries to identify where your trusted controls are already functioning, be it via group policy or endpoint agent controls. Once you’re comfortable with your monitoring, automated action can quickly follow through Enforcement Actions directly on your Active Directory and Endpoint Protection toolkits to secure non-compliant devices. |
Patch Applications | The Patch applications focus area highlights the need for automated asset discovery in conjunction with a robust vulnerability scanning and patch management program, with multiple timeline restrictions being outlined for various application types, application contexts (e.g., End of Life), and device contexts (e.g., Public facing) | Leveraging easy-to-set-up integrations with your existing patch management controls, security, and scanning tools, Axonius can fill the gap between device context, threat intelligence, exploit criticality, and patch management. Bridging this gap allows you to effectively gauge your current compliance against the sophisticated and nuanced approaches to patch management required by Essential Eight. |
Configure Microsoft Office Macros | Microsoft Office Macros provide a dangerous malware delivery vector for organisations, and in this area of Essential Eight, organisations seek to tightly control the execution of macros and to enforce default-block rules across the environment. | Similar to Application Control, Office Macro controls are often enforced via Group Policy or Endpoint Agent policies. Using Axonius, you can rapidly assess the state of your office macro controls using simple queries to identify where your trusted controls are already functioning, be it via group policy or endpoint agent controls. Once you’re comfortable with your monitoring, automated action can quickly follow through Enforcement Actions directly on your Active Directory and Endpoint Protection toolkits to secure non-compliant devices. |
User Application Hardening | User Application hardening seeks to reduce security risks associated with user-facing applications, such as web browsers and productivity suites, by restricting potentially risky configurations (such as Java on browsers and code injections from Office) | Similar to Application Control and Office Macro controls, User Application hardening is often enforced via Group Policy or Endpoint Agent policies. Using Axonius, you can rapidly assess the state of your application controls using simple queries to identify where your trusted controls are already functioning, be it via group policy or endpoint agent controls. Once you’re comfortable with your monitoring, automated action can quickly follow through Enforcement Actions directly on your Active Directory and Endpoint Protection toolkits to secure non-compliant devices. |
Restrict Administrative Privileges | Essential Eight's Restrict Administrative Privileges focus area aims to limit the impact of a compromised user account. This part of the framework seeks to ensure that users only have the minimum access required to perform their jobs, preventing an attacker from gaining full control of the network. | Presently, maturity level 1 of Restrict Administrative privileges is out of scope for the Axonius Cyber Asset Cloud platform. |
Patch Operating Systems | Aggregates OS patch status data from all devices, regardless of location or type. Identifies missing OS patches and correlates them with known vulnerabilities, offering a real-time view of patch compliance. | Similar to Patching Applications, you can leverage Axonius’s easy-to-set-up integrations with your existing patch management controls, security and scanning tools, to fill the gap between device context, threat intelligence, exploit criticality, OS End-of-Life data and patch management. Bridging this gap allows you to effectively gauge your current compliance against sophisticated and nuanced approaches to patch management, highlighting legacy systems as well as urgent patches, no matter what device you are examining. |
Multi-Factor Authentication | Multi-factor authentication, as part of Essential Eight, seeks to ensure that appropriate levels of authentication are being used in each context (be it internet-facing services, sensitive data, or otherwise). | Axonius examines data across your SaaS applications as well as your SSO and LDAP architectures, creating a truly comprehensive inventory of your users and enabling you to effectively monitor the status of authentication factors across both privileged and non-privileged users. |
Regular Backups | The backups portion of Essential Eight seeks to ensure that all important data, software, and configuration settings are backed up resiliently and that appropriate controls are maintained to ensure least privilege across all backup operations (including access, deletion, and modification). | While Axonius is unable to provide granular details about the access, modification, and deletion components of the Regular Backups focus area, the Cyber Assets Cloud can integrate with your backup solution to ensure that your backups are conducted regularly and cover your core and mission-critical applications. |
Key Takeaways
To summarise, Traditional methods often rely on point-in-time assessments, generating static reports that quickly become outdated. This makes it challenging to demonstrate ongoing Essential Eight maturity to auditors or executive leadership. Meanwhile, organisations have already begun adopting Axonius into their Essential Eight programs, highlighting gaps and gauging maturity, with several standout features helping shape the way their Essential Eight program moves forward:
Comprehensive Asset Inventory: Unlike point solutions, Axonius provides a perpetually updated, comprehensive inventory of all assets—managed and unmanaged—across your entire IT environment. This foundational understanding is crucial for all Essential Eight controls.
Automated Data Correlation: Axonius connects to your existing security and management tools, automatically correlating data to provide a unified, accurate, and always-current view of your security posture. This eliminates manual data aggregation and reduces human error.
Policy Enforcement and Orchestration: Beyond just identifying gaps, Axonius can orchestrate automated actions through integrations with existing tools. For example, if an unpatched device is discovered, Axonius can trigger your patching solution to address it, or should a device be discovered without the appropriate group policy, Axonius can update Active Directory to align the device with its appropriate groups/OU.
Continuous Security Posture Management: Instead of periodic assessments, Axonius provides real-time visibility into your Essential Eight maturity. This enables continuous monitoring and rapid response to deviations from your desired security posture.
Reduced Operational Overhead: By automating asset discovery, data correlation, and policy validation, Axonius significantly reduces the manual effort traditionally associated with Essential Eight compliance and maturity determination. This frees up your security teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
By leveraging Axonius, organisations can move beyond a reactive, checklist-based approach to the Essential Eight and gain the comprehensive visibility and automated control necessary to build a truly resilient cyber defense. This will ensure that your organization is not just compliant but genuinely secure.
For more information on how Axonius can help your organization strengthen its Essential Eight posture, we’ve got a webinar that can help. Register to join the upcoming Essential Eight webinar: Achieving Maturity through Continuous Control Monitoring by clicking here.
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- Compliance and Frameworks
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