Self-Employed? Solopreneur? NIST Has a Cybersecurity Guide Just for You
nist.gov
nist.gov
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 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.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.50.pdf
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/fact-s...
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/MFA-Fa...
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
Similar is the case with other concepts; It is all simply explained and not some deep security bits-and-bytes stuff. You need to read the document.
Since this is the Internet, you can claim anything but one only need accept it if it matches with one's own (and fellow tech. colleagues) experiences.
I have explained cybersecurity concepts to a lot of laypeople and it has never been the case that they could not understand any individual technical concept. The problem has always been walking them through all the links in the end-to-end chain and explaining where the vulnerabilities lie so they get the big picture. Do this at a simple high-level with proper analogies and almost everybody gets it.
This document is a very good start and should be recommended to everybody.
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.
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.
yet its title is:
> Small Business Cybersecurity: Non-Employer Firms (NIST Cybersecurity White Paper 50)
Small businesses don't identify as 'Non-Employer Firms', have no idea what 'NIST' is, most wouldn't know what a White Paper is, nor number 50.
'A Crash Course in Cybersecurity for Small Businesses' would be an improvement.
Everything is available if you had cared to look - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50349123
> 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.
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.
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.
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:
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/advice-guidance/self-employe...
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
1. Checkbox compliance
2. Insurance
3. Access controls
4. Good luck
That's not cybersecurity, that's hopium in vain.
The rest is indeed more of a compliance thing, but plenty of small businesses won’t do the 4 things I mentioned above.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Requests for comments from career security experts: is this any good?
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
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:
"Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U )
>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
In general, it is great when everything goes right, but I have had a few close calls over the years by extending far too much credit to large clients. When I advise kids turn down any deal larger than 15% of annual revenue, it is a policy that will keep a sustained growth with mitigated risk.
When you are a small firm, burning $50k/month on labor means you don't get to make too many mistakes before you are out of business. About 1:22 startups succeed past 3 years, and product based firms are 5 to 7 times lower odds.
The software business isn't about writing software, but reselling the same software many times over. If you let one client use you as a staffing agency, there is no product at the end of your labors.
Good luck, and never try to do it all by yourself. =3
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.
I suggest that you submit it to HN with your comment/recommendations so people can benefit from it.
I submitted the NIST portal here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50349123
- 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"
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.
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?
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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.
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.
At least we now know that making things go bad is yet another attack vector they have.
—-
An anecdote on Apple:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's TFA btw, took me several clicks through "superseded by" links...": https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.50.pdf
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.*
Therefore, the laypeople this is aimed at will never find it.
Or you could download it directly from the link given by a user here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50345842
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.
Here is their main portal for the above; Small Business Cybersecurity Corner - https://www.nist.gov/itl/smallbusinesscyber
This speculation suggests that you haven't ever done much support work.
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.
What you’re defending is poor UX that would be easily improved by a download button, that a majority of other such sites what’s include, for obvious reasons. It’s a site for accessing documents ffs!
It is not poor UX to not have a download button. That just became popular due to mobile devices. For document-centric sites it is better to have a uniform way of locating/downloading documents under a "Documentation" section which is what is done here.
For something coming from NIST, I would expect six 9s performance at a minimum. Benchmarks are all over the place for prompts.