Cyber Essentials
About Cyber Essentials
Cyber Essentials helps you make your business more resilient against a cyber-attacks.
Achieving Cyber Essentials allows you to guard your organisation against the most common cyber threats and helps you to demonstrate your commitment to cyber resilience for your customers and staff.
What is Cyber Essentials?
Cyber Essentials is a simple and effective Government-backed scheme, supported by industry experts and the Cyber Resilience Centre Network, that will help you put measures in place to protect your organisation, regardless of size or sector, against a range of the most common cyber-attacks. This includes protecting against threats such as malware, ransomware and phishing.
Cyber Essentials can be achieved through two levels of certification:
Cyber Essentials
The first tier of Cyber Essentials is a self-assessment option which gives you resilience against a wide variety of the most common cyber-attacks. Your organisation can assess themselves against five basic security controls and a qualified assessor can verify the information provided. This includes using firewalls, having secure configuration in place, software patching and having secure user and administration accounts.
Achieving Cyber Essentials allows you to:
Make your organisation more resilient against the most common forms of cyber-attacks.
Demonstrate a commitment to cyber security to your customers and clients with a certificate and badge to display in your premises and website.
Achieve more business with the assurance that you take cyber-security seriously.
You can achieve Cyber Essentials with the help of our Cyber Essentials Partners group.
Cyber Essentials Plus
The second tier of Cyber Essentials is Cyber Essentials Plus. Cyber Essentials Plus offers the same simplistic approach as the first tier, but also involves physical tests to your network and computers by independent professionals. Successful accreditation of Cyber Essentials Plus provides a higher level of assurance that your organisation has a strong cyber resilience regime with correctly implemented controls in place to maintain a robust defence against cyber-attacks.
With Cyber Essentials Plus, you can:
Demonstrate a commitment to cyber security to your customers and clients with an enhanced certificate and badge to display in your premises and website.
Attract new business with the assurance you have cyber security measures in place.
Attract new government contracts that require Cyber Essentials Plus certification.
You can achieve Cyber Essentials Plus with the help of our Trusted Partners group.
Cyber Essentials Readiness Tool
Sometimes, organisations are unsure about where to start to prepare for Cyber Essentials. This simple tool is a series of questions that have been developed to lead you through the main parts of the Cyber Essentials requirements. If there are areas where you need to put more controls in place, you will get a link to guidance about how to make those changes. At the end of this process, you will get a list of actions outlining what steps you need to take to prepare for Cyber Essentials and links to specific guidance on those actions.
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This readiness tool is the step that comes before taking the Cyber Essentials self-assessment. It will start you on your journey towards becoming Cyber Essentials certified.
Important note
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Although you may have completed the questions in this readiness tool, it doesn’t automatically mean you will pass the Cyber Essentials assessment. This platform has been designed to give you a list of items to consider, in preparation for the Cyber Essentials assessment.