Essential Eight

Catalyst evaluates how effectively your organisation prevents unapproved or malicious software from executing across your environment. We assess your application whitelisting implementation, policy effectiveness, and coverage across all systems to ensure only trusted applications can run, providing a critical first line of defence against malware and unauthorised software.

Our team assesses how promptly and consistently security patches are applied to applications across your environment. Qualified consultants evaluate your patch management processes, automation capabilities, testing procedures, and compliance with ACSC timelines for critical and non-critical vulnerabilities to ensure your applications remain secure against known threats.

We evaluate how effectively your organisation restricts macro usage to prevent exploitation through Microsoft Office applications. The team will review your macro security policies, analyse execution restrictions, assess digitally signed macro requirements, and validate controls preventing macro-based attacks that are commonly used in phishing and malware campaigns.

Catalyst measures how thoroughly risky application features such as Flash, Java, and browser plugins are disabled or controlled across your environment. We examine browser security configurations, plugin restrictions, ActiveX controls, and other attack vectors commonly exploited through user applications to reduce your attack surface.

Our specialists assesses how tightly administrative access is controlled and monitored across your environment. We review privileged account management, just-in-time access controls, administrative workstation security, and monitoring capabilities for elevated privileges to prevent lateral movement and limit the impact of compromised accounts.

We measure the speed and completeness of operating system security updates across your infrastructure. The Catalyst catalyst team will evaluate your OS patch management processes, automated deployment capabilities, testing frameworks, and adherence to ACSC patching timelines for system-level vulnerabilities to ensure your foundation remains secure.

Catalyst evaluates the enforcement and coverage of multi-factor authentication across all user types and access scenarios. We assess MFA implementation across all systems, analyse authentication methods, review bypass scenarios, and validate coverage for privileged accounts, remote access, and critical systems to strengthen your authentication posture.

We comprehensively assess the effectiveness, frequency, and restoration capability of your backup systems to ensure business continuity during cyber incidents. The team then evaluate backup strategies, test restoration procedures, review offline backup security, analyse retention policies, and validate business continuity capabilities to protect against ransomware and data loss.