Guidance
How to prepare for and plan your organisation's response to severe cyber threat: a guide for CNI
Act now to be ready to withstand and recover from severe cyber attacks.
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Activity 3. Harden defences
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Hardening defences means strengthening your systems, networks, and processes to reduce vulnerabilities and limit the impact of attacks. It involves:
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applying security best practices now
such as patching, secure configuration, and access controls (see 3.1)
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designing robust systems architectures
for flexibility, defensibility and resilience (see 3.2)
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planning to be able to rapidly harden security measures
like isolation and segmentation during a severe cyber incident (see 3.3)
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documenting and rehearsing defensive actions
(see 3.4)
For CNI organisations, being able to harden defences to reduce exposure and ensure you can rapidly escalate to extreme measures – such as network isolation or system isolation and rebuild – without chaos, if and when a cyber threat becomes severe, or an attack occurs.