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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is part of the US Department of Commerce and was founded in 1901. NIST was originally established to help the U.S. industry become more competitive with economic rivals and peers, such as the UK and Germany. NIST prioritizes developing measurements, metrics, and standards for technology used in different industries.
NIST is a non-regulatory agency, and as a result, NIST compliance is not mandatory. However, NIST works with many commercial sectors and government agencies to create policies and standards that will benefit technology development. The NIST cybersecurity framework is considered standard best practice for many in the industry. It’s estimated that more than 30% of U.S. companies use the NIST Cybersecurity Framework as their standard for data protection.
This guide breaks down the NIST cybersecurity framework, best practices, and a high-level checklist to implement NIST recommendations at your enterprise.
Before discussing NIST, it makes sense to first evaluate what the purpose of a cybersecurity framework is. In many cases security practitioners use frameworks like the NIST cybersecurity framework as a template of sorts to inform how their security program should be structured. Here's cybersecurity industry veteran Ty Sbano talking about the role NIST has played for him.
The Core of the framework consists of five functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover. These NIST security best practices make up the lifecycle for managing cybersecurity.
The first step in the NIST framework is to identify all critical software solutions and systems that need protection. This step brings transparency to what tools, platforms, and solutions are utilized at your organization and helps lay out steps to protect critical systems first. In this phase, some activities include:
Understand what you need to protect, the threat landscape, and begin developing a strategy that prioritizes business-critical infrastructure.
Next, the organization should take steps to reduce the number of attacks, incursions, or leaks that could happen, as well as to limit the damage that could occur in the event of a successful hack. Develop and implement safeguards to ensure that your business is prepared (and has a plan to respond if these safeguards fail). Some activities include:
Some best practices recommended by NIST overlap with HIPAA and other security regimes. Make sure you understand what your compliance responsibilities are while implementing security protections.
Despite best efforts, you may still have to remedy a security incident, whether it’s a zero-day exploit or some other vulnerability. It’s important to be constantly monitoring your system for a data security breach. In 2016, more than 25% of data breaches were undiscovered for more than a month; 10% of breaches went undetected for more than an entire year. Here are some ways you detect an issue:
Nightfall AI is integral to detecting an issue. Nightfall is the industry’s first cloud-native DLP platform that discovers, classifies, and protects data in the cloud by integrating directly on the API level. We leverage machine learning to scan data and its surrounding context, covering both structured and unstructured data with high levels of accuracy. Nightfall has over 150+ detectors that can scan over 100+ file types to identify instances of improper data sharing. Nightfall can then redact, quarantine, and delete text, strings, messages, or files containing sensitive tokens.
The fourth phase, respond, covers the processes and guidelines that a company will follow in the event of a cyber attack. While it can be hard to predict a response when the type of attack is unknown, having protocols in place makes it easier to minimize damage and assign responsibilities in an emergency. Activities in this phase will include:
Good communication is a critical part of the respond phase.
Finally, recover is a phase that plans for business continuity. What steps will your company take in the aftermath of a cybersecurity attack? Planning in this phase include things like:
The Framework is designed to be used by businesses of all sizes in virtually every industry. That said, one company’s approach to implementing the Core Framework will look different from another company’s approach. Nevertheless, this NIST security checklist can ensure you’re implementing the Core best practices.
Learn more about how Nightfall can keep your data secure by scheduling a demo at the link below.
