Does your organization currently speak in the NIST framework language? Say bye-bye to manual mapping and say HELLO to filling out inputs in the NIST CSF framework. This new release helps security teams better align with the organization’s internal communications around security controls. We know that staying consistent with the company’s terminology can better help you achieve your goals.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is undergoing a major update. Originally released in 2014, the NIST CSF is one of the most widely used cybersecurity frameworks helping organizations understand and manage their cybersecurity risk. NIST is currently updating the CSF to align with the latest cybersecurity trends and best practices, with the expected release date of the CSF 2.0 slated for the first quarter of 2024.

Like many industries, the federal government and the Department of Defense (DoD) are more digital, more dispersed, and work with more third parties than ever before. This shift means that information the departments deal with, referred to as controlled unclassified information, needs to be protected due to its high value. Enter “Safeguarding covered defense information and cyber incident reporting,” which is part of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) requirements.

In 2001, NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) announced Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a new encryption standard, designed to help organisations enhance protections against brute force attacks. The previous Data Encryption Standard (DES) had become vulnerable, with processing power growing, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had proved that DES encryption could be broken in less than 24 hours, therefore a new encryption standard was required.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is one of several “gold level” standards used by public and private organizations as the basis for their cybersecurity protocols. It is also the benchmark utilized by Trustwave to protect our clients. NIST rolled out the CSF in 2014 as a set of guidelines for mitigating organizational cybersecurity risks.

Since 2014, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a U.S. federal agency, has issued guidelines for managing digital identities via Special Publication 800-63B. The latest revision (rev. 3) was released in 2017, and has been updated as recently as 2019. Revision 4 was made available for comment and review; however, revision 3 is still the standard as of the time of this blog post.

A weak password can easily become compromised by a cyberattacker, but employing multi-factor authentication (MFA) can stop a cyberattacker in their tracks. MFA is recommended as a best practice by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to reduce risk. Learn more about MFA and how it can protect your company from cyberattacks.

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework was meant to be a dynamic document that is continuously revised, enhanced, and updated. These upgrades allow the Framework to keep up with technological and threat developments, incorporate lessons learned, and transform best practices into standard procedures. NIST created the Framework in 2014 and updated it with CSF 1.1 in April 2018.