Essential 8.

The Essential 8 (or Essential Eight) are recommendations from the Australian Signals Directorate for Australian Government agencies to mitigate over 85% of known cyber-security threats. It comprises the Top 4, which are mandatory for federal government agencies and consist of application whitelisting and patching operating system (OS) patching, and the restriction of administration privileges based on user duties.

This complements the Top 4 with additional recommendations – appropriately configuring Microsoft Office macro settings, user application hardening, implementing multi-factor authentication, and daily backups of key data, software and settings data.