What You Need to Know About UK Cyber Essentials Certification
Cyber Essentials helps UK businesses guard against internet-based attacks and prove their security measures are truly effective.
Cyber Essentials helps UK businesses guard against internet-based attacks and prove their security measures are truly effective.
Cyber Essentials helps UK businesses guard against internet-based attacks and prove their security measures are truly effective.
Cyber Essentials helps UK businesses guard against internet-based attacks and prove their security measures are truly effective.
Cyber Essentials helps UK businesses guard against internet-based attacks and prove their security measures are truly effective.
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Cyber Essentials is a UK government-backed scheme designed to help organizations guard against common internet-based attacks. Earning this certification shows your customers that your security measures are not just in place, but truly effective.
While some cybersecurity and data protection laws are complex, the UK Cyber Essentials Certification is a practical approach that organisations of all sizes could implement.
The requirements apply to all devices and software that:
- Accept incoming network connections from untrusted sources
- Establish user-initiated outbound connections to devices through the internet
- Control data flows between either of the above devices and the internet
As part of your business goals, you want to reach as many customers as possible. Achieving UK Cyber Essentials certification is one way to improve your revenue while protecting sensitive information.
So, what exactly is the Cyber Essentials certification?
Cyber Essentials is the minimum baseline cyber security standard set out by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Organisations can use the government-backed annually renewable certification to provide assurance over their ability to mitigate risks from the most common cyber threats.
You can choose from one of two certification levels - Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus. Neither of these certifications are required by law, but are often required in government contracts, especially those working with the Ministry of Defense.
Why Cyber Essentials certification matters for UK businesses
Cyber Essentials certification helps UK businesses:
- Protect against common cyber threats by demonstrating strong basic cyber hygiene.
- Win contracts, especially with government agencies.
- Build trust by showing your commitment to effective security risk mitigation.
- Reassure potential clients that your business and supply chain meet recognized cybersecurity standards.
To unlock these benefits, your business needs to meet specific Cyber Essentials certification requirements, which focus on five critical areas of cybersecurity.
Cyber Essentials certification requirements
Cyber Essentials focus on five categories of controls:
- Firewalls & Internet Gateways: Evaluates whether you're using physical, virtual, or software firewalls to create a barrier between network-connected devices and the public internet.
- Secure Configuration: Assesses how often you update default settings, such as changing default passwords and disabling unnecessary applications or services, to reduce security risks.
- User Access Control: Verifies that user access is limited based on the principle of least privilege, ensuring individuals only have the minimum access needed for their role.
- Malware Protection: Checks if you have anti-malware solutions in place to detect and prevent malicious code from infecting your devices.
- Security Update Management: Confirms whether you regularly install the latest security patches for operating systems, software, and firmware to address vulnerabilities.
Software-driven businesses should pay extra attention to Secure Configuration and Security Update Management
For software-driven businesses, the Secure Configuration and Security Update Management controls are particularly important to reduce vulnerabilities and maintain strong security hygiene.
Secure Configuration
The Secure Configuration requirements aim to minimize vulnerabilities and restrict technologies to only the functions needed. To meet this requirement, you need to apply security best practices like vulnerability prioritization to all software dependencies and configurations. This involves:
- Identifying all software components and dependencies: This includes direct, transitive, and even hidden ("phantom") dependencies—you can't secure what you don't know you have.
- Finding reachable vulnerabilities: Not all vulnerabilities pose the same level of risk. Understanding how dependencies interact helps you prioritize those that could be exploited.
- Prioritizing remediation activities: Focus on the most dangerous vulnerabilities by combining reachability insights with EPSS scores to address the highest risks first.
- Uncover packaging layer vulnerabilities: This includes identifying risks related to containerized environments and other packaging methods in your application.
Security Update Management
It's easy to assume that installing security patches simply means applying updates from your third-party vendors—even if it risks causing breaking changes. However, you need to consider both your internally developed applications and potential vulnerabilities across the software supply chain.
When purchasing downloadable or web-based applications, consider:
- The vendor’s proprietary source code or binary files.
- The software components included in the source code.
Vendors might not always know all the third-party (and now, fourth-party) dependencies within their software. Your internally developed applications also need regular updates to stay secure.
Keeping open source dependencies up-to-date in your internally developed applications can be especially challenging. Security vulnerabilities in open source are often discovered and reported months or even years after a version is released. Fixes are applied to the latest version, but meanwhile the project has progressed and released new capabilities. This can lead to breaking changes that cost developers hours, weeks, or even months of work.
To meet Cyber Essentials compliance, you should:
- Create a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and VEX repository: Request a detailed list of all software components from your vendors.
- Identify vulnerabilities: Analyze and annotate SBOMs to find vulnerabilities that could affect your business.
- Patch open source vulnerabilities: Upgrade or patch open source vulnerabilities in your internally developed applications in a timely manner.
- Track licenses: Enforce policies to ensure new packages use approved licenses, maintaining visibility and compliance.
Maintaining security updates isn't just about internal systems, it's also important for managing risks across your entire supply chain.
Cyber Essentials for your supply chain security
With nearly half of UK businesses impacted by cybercrime last year, securing your supply chain is more important than ever. Cyber Essentials certification not only strengthens your own security but also helps you evaluate your vendors' security practices. The NCSC offers a list of questions to assess vendor compliance—questions your own customers might ask you. These include questions about your supply chain security, such as:
- Are all installed applications that you provide properly licensed, still supported by the vendor and receiving regular vulnerability fixes?
- List of all the Internet Browsers, Malware Protection Software, Email Applications and Office Applications installed on all devices that you have provided including current version numbers.
- Are all applications you provide properly licensed, vendor-supported, and receiving regular vulnerability fixes?
- Can you provide a list of all installed software, including browsers, malware protection, email, and office applications, along with version numbers?
- Are high-risk or critical security updates applied within 14 days of release?
- Do you remove applications that are no longer supported or no longer receive vulnerability fixes?
- If unsupported applications are not removed, can you provide a list of them?
- Do you use a technical solution, such as MDM, to manage an approved list of company-provided applications?
- Are all operating systems you provide properly licensed, supported, and receiving regular vulnerability fixes?
Some of these questions are pretty straightforward to answer. But things get more complicated when you need to answer questions about how you manage security across your entire software environment. Areas to pay attention to would include:
To stay compliant with Cyber Essentials, you need clear answers about how you manage third-party software, dependencies, and open-source components. Some security tools can make this process a lot easier and more efficient.
Use Endor Labs to achieve and maintain Cyber Essentials certification
Endor Labs provides visibility and insights across your application portfolio, helping you achieve Cyber Essentials Certification without over-burdening your development or security teams.
- Secure Software Development Practices:
- Dependency Management: Scans for vulnerabilities in both direct and transitive dependencies using reachability-based Software Composition Analysis (SCA). This ensures that all software libraries and packages used in applications do not contain known vulnerabilities, aligning with Cyber Essentials' requirement of preventing vulnerabilities in software and services.
- Vulnerability Prioritization: By prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their exploitability, Endor Labs helps development teams focus on and remediate the most critical issues first.
- Access Control and Identity Management:
- Secret Management: Tracks and manages potential secret leaks in repositories and CI/CD pipelines, keeping sensitive credentials and secure. This fulfills Cyber Essentials' controls around secure configuration and access controls.
- Policy Enforcement: Makes sure access control policies are in place, including multi-factor authentication and secure authentication practices, providing visibility into the security configurations of your source code management systems.
- Configuration Management:
- Pipeline Security: Aligns CI/CD pipeline configurations with security best practices, reducing the risk of misconfigurations that could lead to vulnerabilities being introduced during the build process.
- Artifact Signing: Verifies software integrity, ensuring it hasn’t been tampered with. This is essential for maintaining secure configurations.
- Software Maintenance:
- Continuous Monitoring: Continuous monitors open-source components for new vulnerabilities within the software. This aligns with the Cyber Essentials requirement of maintaining up-to-date software to prevent exploitation of known vulnerabilities.
- Patch Management: Speeds up remediation with predictive analysis and backported security patches. This supports the Cyber Essentials principle of applying security patches promptly.
- Incident Management and Threat Detection:
- Risk Identification and Assessment: Identifies and assess risks related to software dependencies and configurations, even integrating with tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud to preemptively address potential cyber threats.
- Call Graph Visualization: Provides a clear picture of how vulnerabilities interact within your codebase, showing what’s reachable, making it easier to respond to incidents.
- Compliance Reporting:
- Compliance Mapping: Generates reports that show how your organization meets Cyber Essentials requirements, offering clear proof of your security practices.
Book a 20-minute demo to learn how Endor Labs helps you not only achieve Cyber Essentials certification but also maintain a strong security posture over time.
