In the last couple of years, we have seen a paradigm change in cyber attacks. Extremely sophisticated attacks (sometimes referred to as the “Advanced Persistent Threat” or “APT”), once the bane of only government and larger defense related firms, have now spread throughout the economy, affecting financial institutions, manufacturers, telecommunication firms, entertainment firms and utilities to name a few.
While many of the larger enterprises that make up the ISA Board have developed numerous practices and procedures that can address these modern threats, these techniques are often too complex and costly for companies outside of the Fortune 100 to manage or implement.
In conjunction with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the ISA sought to bridge this implementation and cost feasibility divide by developing a best practice document that identifies helpful information security measures that smaller firms can deploy to improve their security and mitigate against such APT-style attacks. In the resulting publication, ISA scaled these techniques based on the enterprise’s IT Department size (e.g., organizations that have no IT staff, those that have 10 or less IT staffers, and those that have between 10 and 100 IT staffers).
The publication has been released and is available free of charge by clicking here.