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October 14, 2024

20 High-Priority Improvements for Strong Cyber Hygiene

As technology advances, cyber criminals continually adapt their tactics, exploiting vulnerabilities across identities, data, applications and devices. To keep pace with these evolving threats organisations must consistently strengthen their defences to prevent costly breaches.

Microsoft Secure Score offers businesses a comprehensive way to assess their security posture, evaluating key areas like identity management, data protection, app security and device compliance. While Secure Score highlights critical areas for improvement, implementing these high-impact changes can be complex and time-consuming—especially for already stretched IT teams.

In this guide, we’ll explore 20 high-impact improvements in maximising your Microsoft Secure Score across these key areas, explaining what they are, why they matter and how they lead to stronger security hygiene and better business outcomes.

Maximising Your Microsoft Secure Score

1. Identity & Access Management

Why it’s important: Identities are the gateway to your organisation’s systems. Securing user identities with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and access control policies ensures that unauthorised users can’t easily exploit credentials, preventing many common attacks like phishing or account compromise. Identity is often the first line of defence and a breach here can lead to widespread damage across your entire environment.

1. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
What it is: MFA requires users to verify their identity with two or more authentication factors, like a password and a mobile app code.
Business Outcome: It blocks 99.9% of identity-based attacks, making it one of the simplest ways to secure user accounts.
Complexity: Implementing MFA across an entire organisation, especially for legacy systems, can be time-consuming and may face resistance from users.

2. Enforce Conditional Access Policies
What it is: Conditional Access restricts access to your systems based on predefined rules, such as location, device or user behaviour.
Business Outcome: By restricting access based on risk factors, you can significantly reduce unauthorised access and breaches.
Complexity: Configuring policies that balance security with productivity can be challenging, as you’ll need to carefully manage user access without impacting workflows.

3. Monitor Sign-in Risk
What it is: Sign-in risk monitoring analyses login behaviour, identifying suspicious activities like unusual locations or repeated failed attempts.
Business Outcome: Detecting and responding to these activities in real-time can help prevent breaches before they occur.
Complexity: Ongoing monitoring and interpreting login data requires dedicated attention and expertise to avoid false positives and missed threats.

4. Limit Administrative Privileges
What it is: Reducing administrative privileges means giving users only the access they need, lowering the chances of privilege abuse.
Business Outcome: This minimises the risk of insider threats and accidental misuse of admin rights.
Complexity: Managing admin rights without hindering productivity requires precise configuration and regular reviews.

5. Enable Self-Service Password Reset
What it is: Self-service password reset allows users to reset their own passwords without contacting IT, increasing efficiency.
Business Outcome: This reduces helpdesk workloads and improves security by preventing password reuse and weak password setups.
Complexity: Misconfiguring password reset systems can create vulnerabilities, making careful implementation critical.

2. Data Protection

Why it’s important: Your data is one of your most valuable assets and protecting it from breaches, leaks or theft is critical. Implementing strong encryption, data loss prevention (DLP) policies and retention rules helps safeguard sensitive information, ensuring that only authorised individuals can access or share it. In today’s regulatory landscape, poor data management can also lead to significant fines and compliance risks.

1. Implement Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies
What it is: DLP policies protect sensitive information by detecting and preventing unauthorised sharing or transferring of data.
Business Outcome: Prevents data breaches and helps maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and PCI-DSS.
Complexity: Configuring DLP requires cross-platform integration (email, apps, devices), which can be complex and time-intensive.

2. Encrypt Sensitive Data
What it is: Data encryption secures information by encoding it, ensuring only authorised parties can access it.
Business Outcome: Encryption protects data at rest and in transit, ensuring that even if stolen, it remains unreadable to attackers.
Complexity: Implementing encryption across diverse environments (cloud, on-premises, hybrid) requires proper planning to avoid performance issues.

3. Classify and Label Critical Data
What it is: Data classification involves assigning labels to sensitive information to control its access and usage.
Business Outcome: Ensures that only authorised individuals can view or share critical data, reducing the risk of accidental exposure or breaches.
Complexity: Rolling out classification and labelling policies across an organisation, particularly in heavily regulated industries, can be resource-intensive.

4. Set Up Retention Policies
What it is: Retention policies control how long data is stored and when it should be deleted, ensuring compliance with legal requirements.
Business Outcome: Helps businesses avoid costly fines by ensuring compliance and reducing unnecessary data storage.
Complexity: Different regulations and business needs make configuring proper retention policies complex and error-prone.

5. Prevent External Sharing
What it is: Preventing external sharing means limiting or blocking the ability to share sensitive files with individuals outside the organisation.
Business Outcome: It reduces the risk of data leaks and ensures sensitive business information stays within trusted boundaries.
Complexity: Restricting sharing without disrupting collaboration requires a fine balance of security and usability.

3. Application Security

Why it’s important: Applications—whether internal or third-party—are frequent targets for cyber criminals seeking to exploit vulnerabilities. Ensuring applications are up to date, properly configured and only accessible to authorised users is essential to reducing your attack surface. App security breaches can lead to data loss, unauthorised access and disruptions to business operations.

1. Enable Safe Links and Safe Attachments
What it is: Safe Links and Safe Attachments primarily address email security by scanning URLs and attachments for malicious content before they are opened. While these features are critical for securing email communications, within the Microsoft Secure Score framework, they are categorised under application security. This is because they protect users across Microsoft 365 apps, such as Outlook and Teams, helping to safeguard the broader application environment from phishing and malware attacks.
Business Outcome: Protects against phishing and malware attacks that target users through emails.
Complexity: Ensuring comprehensive coverage across multiple communication platforms and email clients is essential for maximising protection.

2. Enforce Application Whitelisting
What it is: Application whitelisting ensures that only approved applications can be installed and executed on corporate devices.
Business Outcome: Reduces the risk of malware infections and unauthorised software running on your systems.
Complexity: Maintaining an accurate whitelist while avoiding disruptions to user productivity requires ongoing management.

3. Review and Control OAuth App Permissions
What it is: OAuth permissions control third-party app access to your organisation’s Microsoft 365 environment, protecting data from unauthorised access.
Business Outcome: Reduces the risk of data exposure to unverified third-party apps.
Complexity: Keeping track of app permissions and ensuring they are only granted to trusted apps requires continuous monitoring.

4. Regularly Patch and Update Applications
What it is: Regular patching and updates ensure that vulnerabilities in applications are quickly addressed before attackers can exploit them.
Business Outcome: Reduces the risk of cyber attacks by keeping software up to date.
Complexity: Scheduling updates without disrupting daily operations and managing across various apps can be difficult without automated processes.

5. Control App Access with Conditional Access
What it is: Conditional access policies allow you to control which users and devices can access specific applications based on set criteria.
Business Outcome: Ensures that only authorised users on compliant devices can access critical business applications.
Complexity: Fine-tuning access controls to prevent unauthorised access without restricting legitimate usage can be complex.

4. Device Management

Why it’s important: With remote and hybrid working becoming more common, securing endpoints (like laptops, mobile devices and desktops) is vital. Ensuring devices are encrypted, managed and regularly updated reduces the risk of them being compromised by malware, unauthorised access or loss. Unprotected devices are an easy entry point for attackers, who can use them to access broader systems and data.

1. Enable Device Encryption
What it is: Device encryption secures the data on mobile devices, laptops and desktops, ensuring that unauthorised users cannot access it if the device is lost or stolen.
Business Outcome: Protects sensitive information from being compromised in case of a physical security breach.
Complexity: Configuring and managing encryption across various device types and operating systems can be time-consuming.

2. Set Up Mobile Device Management (MDM)
What it is: MDM solutions like Microsoft Intune allow businesses to manage, monitor and secure mobile devices used by employees.
Business Outcome: Ensures compliance with security policies while enabling secure access to company data from mobile devices.
Complexity: Implementing MDM across multiple devices while enforcing policies without disrupting users requires careful planning.

3. Enforce Endpoint Protection
What it is: Endpoint protection secures devices by detecting and responding to malware, ransomware and other security threats in real time.
Business Outcome: Protects all devices, whether inside or outside the office, from common cyberattacks.
Complexity: Continuous monitoring and updates are required to stay ahead of emerging threats.

4. Enable Automatic Device Updates with Windows Autopatch
What it is: Windows Autopatch automates the process of deploying security patches and updates to Windows devices, ensuring they remain up-to-date.
Business Outcome: Keeps devices protected from vulnerabilities by applying the latest updates automatically, minimising security risks while reducing manual IT workload.
Complexity: Requires initial setup and configuration to integrate into existing IT processes, but simplifies patch management and improves overall security with minimal ongoing effort.

5. Block Legacy Authentication
What it is: Legacy authentication protocols are outdated and vulnerable to attacks; blocking them ensures that only modern, secure methods are used for authentication.
Business Outcome: Reduces the attack surface by eliminating weaker, outdated protocols.
Complexity: Phasing out legacy systems while maintaining operational continuity can require significant time and effort.

BONUS – Use Windows Autopilot for Automated Setup and Pre-Configuration
What it is: Windows Autopilot automates the setup and pre-configuration of new Windows devices, allowing them to be provisioned right out of the box.
Business Outcome: Streamlines the device lifecycle management for IT teams by reducing manual setup time and ensuring that devices are configured securely and consistently from day one.
Complexity: Requires integration with Microsoft Intune and initial configuration, but significantly simplifies ongoing device management and onboarding.

Achieve Strong Cyber Hygiene Without Overburdening Your Team

Maximising your Microsoft Secure Score delivers tangible benefits: reduced cyber risks, enhanced regulatory compliance and a stronger security posture. However, implementing these high-impact improvements can be complex and time-consuming, especially for SMEs with limited IT resources.

This is where CyberOne’s Microsoft Secure Score Rapid Remediation service comes in. By leveraging our expertise, we can help you implement these crucial security measures, significantly reducing your risk and improving your Secure Score without disrupting your daily operations.

Contact CyberOne today to learn how we can help you secure your business with our new Microsoft Secure Score Rapid Remediation service.