These sorts of guides, although well-intentioned, are almost invariably very ineffective. It is like asking a techy to produce a cyber-security guide and getting a PDF document with a ton of text and tables in it instead of stepping back and thinking about it.
If you want market penetration, you should instead:
1) Brand it to something that people can recognize on its own website "Cyber Basics", "A simple set of guidelines from the people who protect the USA's infrastructure" or whatever. Give it branded colours, a logo and put it in the media so people recognise it.
2) Think about the UX. You will have people with 0 knowledge, people with IT knowledge but no cybersecurity knowledge, people with a bit of both and you need all of them to have access to this data one size does not fit all.
3) We have had web applications for decades now, why are you producing a PDF? Have interactive content that people can click through, maybe some intro videos, maybe the scary stats, the details for the IT people etc.
4) Make sure that the information is up-to-date, which the PDF will invariably not be since it is likely to involve various cycles of approvals and production before the next version is ready.
This is something that SwiftOnSecurity used to do really well. They didn't try and encourage best practice, just easy things that you could do that were better, presented in a simple and fun style.
It's not perfect, but the UK NCSC has a load of guidance for individuals and small businesses that's a hell of a lot more approachable than the NIST document:
I like those little tidbits for kids like “don’t be like this kid (showing a bad habit), instead be like this kid (showing a good habit)”. It may not be 100% PC but it’s easy to remember. Hah The Simpsons parodied those in a scene showing a booklet titled “Don’t do what Donny-Don’t does”.
Sharing pdf is not inherently bad actually, in fact it is better this way to feed ai clients. But it did surprise me given that the title mentioned the lay language and then what I see is hoops of links I need to jump to get to the main content, this pdf, and no good summary in the landing page.
These are the actual actions recommended in the document (once you get past all the intro about why it’s important):
GOVERN
1. Document and track all legal, regulatory, and contractual cybersecurity requirements
2. Determine whether cybersecurity insurance is appropriate for the business
3. Assess cybersecurity risks posed by suppliers and other third parties
IDENTIFY
4. Create, categorize, and maintain an inventory of the most important hardware, software, data, and services (including cloud services) the business relies upon
5. Create a cybersecurity incident response plan
6. Securely sanitize and destroy data and data storage devices when they’re no longer needed
7. Strive for continuous improvement
8. Document cybersecurity risks to the business assets
PROTECT
9. Limit access to sensitive assets to only those who require it to perform their job responsibilities
10. Change default manufacturer passwords
11. Regularly update and patch software and operating systems
12. Recognize common attacks and perform basic cyber hygiene tasks
13. Regularly back up data. Establish measures to protect and test backups
14. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all accounts that offer it and consider using password managers to generate and protect strong, unique passwords
DETECT
15. Continuously monitor assets to find indicators of attacks or compromises
16. Assess the physical environment for signs of tampering or suspicious activity
RESPOND
17. Execute the incident response plan in coordination with relevant third parties
18. Communicate with internal and external stakeholders on response activities as required by laws, regulations, or policies
RECOVER
19. Execute the recovery portion of the incident response plan
20. Coordinate restoration activities with internal and external parties
21. Document lessons learned from the incident
The linked page simply has one extra hurdle; it requires an entrepreneur to first click on:
> Self-Employed? Solopreneur? NIST Has a Cybersecurity Guide Just for You.
then follow the steps already outlined i.e. click on the abstruse Small Business Cybersecurity: Non-Employer Firms (NIST Cybersecurity White Paper 50), which directs to an academic style page with the report.
If anything, the linked page makes it harder to find, since it requires an additional step.
Since this is intended for small business owners with a thousand competing priorities, hiding the guide between walls of text and down a rabbit hole of unfamiliar links and titles will result in significant drop-off.
Oh, come on! If you went through the latest update news page that is on you. Also if you think small business owners don't know how to navigate a website and get to what they want, you have no idea what you are talking about.
The portal itself has a nice ToC at the left which one has to just browse to easily get to what you want/looking for. Everything is nice and user-friendly.
PS: The above link was to my HN submission to the NIST portal so people can discuss it there.
You click the link, then you are redirected to a academic paper landing page, then you have to know to look over on the right hand side for a url that is just a random sequence of numbers, and click that to actually get to the content. This is not something that is designed for non-technical people.
Did you read the paper? Because it doesn't look like it. There are actionable lists for all examples. Everyone with basic reading comprehension can do it.
We (technical folk) can (mostly; some of the terminology is needlessly unfamiliar). A florist, beautician, candle maker, restaurateur or scuba tour operator is unlikely to find themselves on the NIST website pilfering through webpages that may as well be in another language.
You evidently have not read the paper and yet are arguing needlessly.
The paper itself includes three hypothetical usecases viz. a) IP lawyer helping small businesses, b) Individual who just started a eCommerce company selling novelties they manufacture in their home workshop c) A marketing and sales consultant helping small businesses.
Each of the above links to detailed worksheets for their cybersecurity strategy which can be downloaded as supplementary material. This contextualizes everything in the real world.
W.r.t. your comment on "florist ... etc", you are simply making up stuff. Most of the small business owners are pretty sharp (you have to be to manage everything yourself) and know what they exactly need. The only help they need is with navigating the technological path given the complexity involved.
The NIST portal and the submitted paper help immensely with that and should be recommended to everyone.
The amount of nonsense in this thread regarding navigation makes you think it is all being orchestrated to hide this from the public. Downvote and Flag them all.
IMO this misses the mark. Yes, it’s a decent attempt at simplifying cybersecurity, but if this is aimed at entry-level, non-technical people, it’s not gonna work.
One of my earliest jobs was to redesign training materials for one of the worlds largest companies. I stripped the training to its core, the true basics, and started there. The results were remarkable. I feel the urge to do the same with this document…
I'd be interested in a small sample of what you're talking about. I suspect that's a marketable product these days even if all you do is deslopify generated documentation.
I’m seconding the request. Anything specific that you (xvxvx) would explain to a layman differently? Even the briefest of examples would be a nice thought to chew on. “A should be B because C.”
I do a lot of explaining to non-techy people. My approach would be to print out the document and walk through it with them. Have the goal first be understanding of why certain things are a priority. Like it’s a baseball game: the three outfielders and three infielders are important to covering all your bases. We’re talking about this angle, in this context, and once the “why” is understood it’ll help them interpret the document correctly.
Links are almost an anti-pattern. The reader should not have to click links unless they're really interested in diving deep on that particular topic (and ideally it's more of an endnote thing, not inline)
Read the document; it does explain phishing/etc. for a layperson in simple terms in the document itself. The gp just pointed to more resources for further study mentioned in the document.
Sure, in the glossary. But you have to explain it first before you start throwing jargon around. Otherwise people will bounce off it or go off their own incorrect perception of the word because vanishingly few people in the target audience will bother with the glossary, or even realize one is there without a specific callout up front
I work in the MSP world and have supported hundreds of small businesses. Trust me when I tell you >80% of the people who should read this won’t make it past the first couple pages
What is your go to heuristic / mental model you use when stripping down to the essential core? Lots of marginal items needing judgment calls. What was your guiding light?
Have you read CSWP50? Its not exactly written on the 3rd grade level. I think its a pretty good compromise between something only your IT department can understand and what a small employer needs to know. If anything, it leans too technical and verbose.
Not only are there links to go deeper into each subject matter but also a part telling the employer how to hire help if they need cybersecurity help and with a link to the "Small Business Cybersecurity Support Programs Finder" directory. Ideally they should be asking around in the small business community for a local vendor, but this document does a lot of things right.
I think this is an excellent document for small business and doesn't really talk down to them.
> I think this is an excellent document for small business and doesn't really talk down to them.
Right, the gp has not read it or are intentionally trying to spread FUD.
This is a good document as is generally the case for all NIST documents. It is even more relevant for the "general public" since every home has similar problems as far as cybersecurity is concerned.
Cybersecurity knowledge is vital for everyone nowadays. Hence I highly encourage people to read this and other documents linked to.
NIST is one of the few orgs who still do a pretty good job and hence should always be taken seriously. Based on their recommendations create your own checklist/workflow and have everybody at your org/home follow it.
This is my first time seeing “SI” in the wild. That is such a wrong term. It’s jargon in a place where it doesn’t belong.
It’s a darn fancy algorithm and a cool tool. Putting it on a pedestal instead of grounding it to reality is not going to help anyone. My condolences to the authors.
Federal executive agencies have to be loyal to the government because they are the government. Working for the government and refusing to do what it wants is at best dereliction of work duties and at worst treason.
Must cover for child abusers and bomb schools - not a great time (or maybe a great time if you are into that sort of thing) to be a government employee
There are exceptions to that - government employees are not required to follow illegal orders. The law says you can't be retaliated against for refusing such orders. There are also legal protections for whistleblowers reporting wrongdoing, at least theoretically (ask Snowden about that.)
This doesn't apply to executive orders renaming things of course, since they're not illegal. But the point is that working for the government is not some sort of legal suicide pact.
Even when asked to do something illegal, your options are to quit or to be in big trouble one way or another.
If you do the thing then you're a criminal. If you don't do it, your employer will still do everything they can to make your life hell, such as illegally firing you for insubordination to an illegal order - you might get your backpay in court if you're lucky later, but you're never getting your job back.
It's even worse than that; the president has declared anyone using the term "AI" is the Enemy, and aiding the Enemy is a capital crime.
You could say the president is just joking about such things; I don't think this will actually be acted upon, but the political/legal situation is quite rough.
I hear they have great "AI" programs in El Salvador! If you say the right things you might even be selected for a free trip here. Such a bargain. And the weight loss plan their nutrition experts have put together is top tier.
Yeah, I dislike it too. As do most of the agencies forced to swap over to it I reckon, since "SI" is a vanity project and "AI" is what the rest of the world understands it to be.
“The publication is an update to what was previously titled Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals (NISTIR 7621). While that publication was aimed at small businesses of varying sizes and covered the broader topic of information security, the revision is narrower in scope [...]”
The original publication is now withdrawn and replaced with this new one, which targets self-employed people / solopreneurs specifically. So, there is no current guide for small businesses anymore?
If you succeed to read it (the admin writing style of NIST is quite dense), it's quite good.
It's a bit procedural and admin focus... but if you execute all of it, at least it's easier to defend yourself during an hack towards your clients or third parties.
I would have prefer something a bit more technical, but it's a good entrypoint, at least to help hire or consult a security professional.
NIST generally publishes excellent guidelines on operational security for academics, and commercial firms.
As a "solo" anything you are going to fail sooner or later. At minimum one requires a gray-beard IT person/consultant with a vested interest in your survival, legal consultant in corporate contract/employment laws, legal consultant in Intellectual Property (Copyright/Trademarks/Patents), a commercial Accountant familiar with tax laws, and a customs broker to handle international shipping rules.
No one is an "expert" all the time, but without key people a small firm will get squashed pretty quickly. =3
What would consulting a corporate contracting expert do if you have no employees? Not to mention the customs broker... I doubt my local plumber or a freelance software engineer has any of these.
The fact you have to ask means one should consider talking with the noted experts. I am surprised some people get petulant over the simple fact that dealing with around 1:15 customers are going to be a problem.
Contracts and trade rules can leave you with a warehouse full of widgets you are obligated to pay to store at a loss as things get sorted out ($74k/quarter.) Also, legal mistakes can end up with you paying for nonsense services due to shady EULA ($14k annual recurring fees for some SaaS-hole), or a subcontractor decides to declare dependent-contractor status on their tax return putting you on the hook for $70k in additional taxes.
There are dozens of scenarios people learn the expensive way (down-votes are proof a few people will try), but getting paid gets trickier as the business gets larger. This funny talk is a bare minimum crash course on the core of building a business, which is capturing revenue for delivered products and services:
>I doubt my local plumber or a freelance software engineer has any of these.
Sure, up until they buy consumables wholesale, track customer service, preserve accounting records, and or need to recover money from someone that can't or won't pay for services rendered and products consumed.
If people try to do it all themselves, they will either end up conned, over-worked, in court or fined for naively doing something silly. ymmv =3
A backup that a compromised host can write, replace, is override with everything in ransonwhere event.
We need a immutable and off site copy. And escentialy a backup never tested is a schroding-backup, not a real.
A best way is completly test your backup, in trashable environment, if successful restore, your right, if not...
Some part of it can already be tested during creating the backup. It's not 100% foolproof of course and you should still test restoring once in a while but my backuping procedure goes kinda like this (simplifying for the sake of explaining):
- compress backup
- encrypt backup
- add cryptographic checksum to encrypted backup file(s)
- pass the newly created backup to a container that only has access in read-only to the volume with the backup
- verify the cryptographic hash
- decrypt
- decompress
- verify everything that can be verified
- if all passes, whitelist the cryptographic hash for that backup as "known restorable backup"
So the very process of creating the backup already contains a lot of the checks needed to make sure you can restore the backup.
I still, once in a while, take a backup at random and verify that it can be restored but basically already by verifying that the cryptographic checksum matches, I'm pretty confident it's gonna work.
Never failed.
A proper backup procedure can be so much more than simply: compress/encrypt.
A real cycle, before whitelisting the backup as "probably restorable", is way more involved than that.
As the target audience for this white paper, I’d appreciate HN’s take on the accuracy of this. Whether it misses something, deserves praise or any resources you can point out to make this advice even more actionable.
What’s your advice to a non-technical / non-tech savvy small business owner? Say, for example, people used to buy anti virus as a solution. What could they do now that resembles that?
—-
I work with lots of non-technical / non-tech savvy small business owners and many of them are showing concern. So, I’d love to share as much as possible with the people who are not Palo Alto networks clients.
IMHO NIST advice is highly reliable but it's often too complicated to be useful, which seems to be the case here (that's up to you, of course).
Otherwise, you need to start with an idea of what valuables you have and what threats - hackers? lawsuits? competitors? how well-resourced? - you're protecting against. No security will be perfect. You need to make it more expensive to steal your data than it's worth to the attacker.
A few general tips off the top of my head:
* As much as possible, don't store anything on a computer that you don't want to read in the news or hear read to you in court. The safest data doesn't exist. For any communications, set a retention period (e.g., delete messages in 30 days), and just save separately anything you need to keep.
* Store confidential data (passwords, credit card numbers, anything that can cost money or reputation) only in a secure database; the only exception is when the data is actually requird. Password databases, if they have long-enough fields, can work here. Do not keep it in emails - don't email around passwords, credit card numbers, etc.; otherwise when the hacker accesses your email, all is lost. This especially applies to confidential client data - you don't want to have to explain to all your clients, 'you're confidential data might have been stolen - I don't really know if they hacker found it or will use it.' With a secure database, you have peace of mind.
* Use Apple products. They prioritize security and have the resources to deliver on it; they are the fastest route to security. Windows' value is to larger organizations managing large numbers of computers. Linux is too complicated to secure for non-technical users (and probably isn't as secure as Apple). It does require trusting Apple, but you need to trust someone.
* Use Signal for communication, as much as possible.
* Security is much too hard to do yourself. Depending on need, use products that a vendor remotely manages (but then you need to trust the vendor). Use your firewall to filter viruses, though that's imperfect and you need to be careful about it slowing down throughput.
I was in Colombia a couple of months ago and I got my phone stolen (iPhone 16). I rushed home to mark it as stolen using the find my feature using my Mac. It went through and I felt incredibly relieved. Then, a couple of minutes after, I receive a bunch of emails from many of my online accounts sending auth codes and making sure it was me changing the password. I then spent several hours in a back and forth trying to get a hold of the situation which thankfully was solved. I just know that my grandma would’ve had a different story to tell…
I’ve heard the same story from friends that have had their phones stolen also.
So, how secure is Apple? I think it is and feels like it’s transforming to an it used to be.
It feels like anything that’s now connected to the internet holds a back door waiting to be discovered sooner or later.
So, from what I’m learning, it’s not really about stopping the breaches because it’s hard to say you’re ever going to be free from breaches, but creating a system of data storage that takes potential breaches in mind.
I have no idea what happened. I expect any experienced attacker knows about remote lock and remote wipe, and their first step would be extract everything they can ASAP.
Then they can load the extracted bits onto something else and go forward from there.
> it’s not really about stopping the breaches because it’s hard to say you’re ever going to be free from breaches, but creating a system of data storage that takes potential breaches in mind.
It's all of the above; generally it's called 'defense in depth': you don't just want a hard shell, you also want to secure the internal components - data and code.
Again, you want to start with a census of what is valuable and focus on protecting those things. You don't have resources to secure everything.
makes me wonder how many super markets would have thoughts to include the food in their freezers as part of their securables before the recent cyber attacks that spoiled food by taking control of the cooling systems. it’s a good framework but hard to apply…
May something aimed at a average home-owner / individual -- dealing with a ton of digotal equipment from routers to Macs/PCs to home camera and security systems to smart TV and smart bidets could probably use of good use too (of course it may need update every few months though)
I mean it really should be 6 rules or something, then with some click through for more info and then perhaps some (very) practical, immediately actionable tips, perhaps then some stories of diginoobs applying these rules and getting their butts saved by them.
This is just... More like, I as a cyber specialist can use this to wave in normies' faces like: See! You don't even understand the basics! Pay me! (Which I won't do btw.) I mean it's a g-damned PDF man. A wall of text. Jeez.
When I worked at "large health tech company", we would have courses: Click in this image on what is unsafe, and then an image with an unlocked computer, USB drive on the floor, etc. Next screen: Is this Phishing and why? Click on the clues (weird domainname, old company logo)... Etc. Wasn't all that bad actually.
Edit: I Thought I was going to be able to show this to some locals here, but even if there was no language barrier, I don't see our group of physiotherapists organize a close reading of texts like below and implement anything remotely useful:
*The CSF Core (Fig. 5) provides high-level
cybersecurity outcomes (i.e., a result from taking
action) organized into Functions (Table 2), Categories, and Subcategories, that can help any
organization manage its cybersecurity risks. These can be understood by a broad audience,
including executives, managers, and practitioners, regardless of their cybersecurity expertise.*
If I see a document that uses "SI" seriously I'm going to treat everything in it with a very high degree of suspicion. Whatever people produced this document have clearly been required to kiss the ring by using the new federal mandate for SI, which makes its entire content suspect.
Hopefully the Canadian, Australian or some European governments have a better and functionally equivalent guide that can be better trusted not to mislead the reader.
Yesterday I was reading through the Stanford Security Standards and thought is was very wellbeing made, simple UI, efficient and easy to follow - considering most subjects are complex for the general public they did a really great job
We're not living in the bad timeline; we're living in the absolute clown timeline.
1.9. Super Intelligence (SI)
Small businesses are increasingly leveraging SI products and services to extend limited resources and run an efficient, competitive, innovative business. For example, SI systems are often used to write code, automate workflows, generate content, or provide customer support.
Fortunately, I can use Even Superiorer Intelligence (ESI) to fix this PDF and replace this dumb-ass term with the proper nomenclature.
No, no, you're missing the point! Today its only "super" intelligence, then soon enough as it improves it will go to ludicrous intelligence, at which point its intelligence will have reached plaid!
No, there is a clear and explicit "Download URL" in 2 clicks which any 5th-grader/grandpa who has used the web knows to look for and click.
We must not encourage useless comments like these particularly when it comes to publications from NIST. NIST is one of the best sources for technical information. While they have traditionally focused on govt. agencies and experts, they have also majorly expanded their offerings targeted at general public/small businesses/solopreuners/etc.
Your reply suggests that you haven't grasped the underlying point being made.
Most (all?) people today spend at least a couple of hours everyday surfing the web on all sorts of devices. Hence they have seen all sorts of Web UI (good/bad/ugly) and thus know how to navigate them to get to what they want.
Hence to harp on website navigation is foolish. Particularly when the site is actually pretty good design focusing on information and not UI fluff.
If you want market penetration, you should instead:
1) Brand it to something that people can recognize on its own website "Cyber Basics", "A simple set of guidelines from the people who protect the USA's infrastructure" or whatever. Give it branded colours, a logo and put it in the media so people recognise it.
2) Think about the UX. You will have people with 0 knowledge, people with IT knowledge but no cybersecurity knowledge, people with a bit of both and you need all of them to have access to this data one size does not fit all.
3) We have had web applications for decades now, why are you producing a PDF? Have interactive content that people can click through, maybe some intro videos, maybe the scary stats, the details for the IT people etc.
4) Make sure that the information is up-to-date, which the PDF will invariably not be since it is likely to involve various cycles of approvals and production before the next version is ready.