NEW: 11 Essential Cybersecurity Controls + A Live Discussion

Sep 24

If you missed the Press Release or the post from our Partners at Cybereason, you’re not too late - the LinkedIn Live event hasn’t happened yet. Also, we won’t bury the lede. You want all 11 Controls? Or just the Cheat Sheet? There you go (links also included below). Now - on to the post!

Behind the Scenes

If you’ve ever looked at a security framework and felt like it was written for auditors instead of defenders, you’re not alone. Long lists of controls can feel overwhelming, full of buzzwords, and hard to translate into action when you’re in the middle of hardening systems, much less responding to a real incident.

That’s why we paired up with the team at Cybereason, who have run more than 7,000 incident response cases to build something different. We’ve pulled out the 11 controls that actually matter to move the needle on managing risk, the same ones that consistently show up in investigations as the difference between “contained quickly” and “spirals out of control.”

These aren’t theories or nice-to-haves. They’re the controls that help you deter, detect, and disrupt attackers and their attacks.

What Makes These Controls Different

Each of the 11 controls comes with two things you don’t usually get in a standard “framework” approach:

Pitfalls to avoid. Not just “turn it on” or “ensure it’s deployed,” but actual feedback on what defenders often get wrong in practice. As we all know, the devil’s in the details, and doubly-so with security & technology.
DFIR perspective. A direct line from what the investigation teams saw on compromised systems to how the right control would have changed the outcome. Helpful context for those of you needing to make a business case.

That means when you invest in deploying these controls at your organization, you’re not just aligning with CIS or NIST (though you are, for sure). You’re also building real-world resilience against the threats we all face every day.

Why It Matters

We’ve said it before on The Intentional Brief: resilience comes from consistent basics done well. The 11 Essential Controls are those basics, distilled down, field-tested, and proven.

Or, as Devon Ackerman, Cybereason’s Global Head of DFIR, put it:

“These are the controls that we know, because we’ve seen them work, stop attackers in their tracks and dramatically improve security outcomes.”

That’s clarity worth leaning on.

Ready to Dig In?

The full 11 Essential Cybersecurity Controls are now live, complete with a practical cheat sheet, linked to above and below.

For a bit of fun, the marketing folks developed an Essential Controls crossword! Take a look, share with your team (or your spouse, kids, best friend, worst enemy), or use it as a way to test what you might already know about the security controls that matter most.