What is the NIST cybersecurity framework?

Key takeaways:

• The NIST cybersecurity framework provides a set of best practices to enhance organizational cybersecurity.

• It consists of five core steps: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.

  • Identify focuses on asset management, risk assessment, and documentation.

  • Protect involves implementing control policies, data security, and user training.

  • Detect emphasizes continuous monitoring for vulnerabilities and threats.

  • Respond includes incident response plans for mitigating security breaches.

  • Recover outlines recovery strategies and system improvements after incidents.

• The framework's maturity levels, or Tiers, range from Partial to Adaptive, helping organizations assess and improve their security.

• Profiles help tailor cybersecurity activities to meet business requirements and risk tolerance.

• The framework is flexible and applicable across various industries, scalable for organizations of any size.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency that develops and promotes cybersecurity standards and guidelines.

The cybersecurity framework is a set of best practices, procedures, and standards to help organizations improve and maintain their cybersecurity posture. NIST has a cybersecurity framework that explains the series of steps to be followed to increase the security strength of the organization.

Now, we’ll discuss the steps of the NIST cybersecurity framework and how these steps help organizations manage and minimize risks.

Components of the framework

The cybersecurity framework consists of three main components. It is important to understand these steps to implement the framework on the system.

Core

The core of the framework provides a set of practices that an organization should implement. The core is provided in the common language. This provides a high-level view of the activities that organizations should undertake to improve the security and risk management process of the organization.

Steps of the NIST cybersecurity framework

Organizations implement the NIST cybersecurity framework to ensure the security of the system. The framework sets some guidelines and standards that help identify, respond to, and mitigate cyberattacks. The steps that it covers are:

1. Identify: The process of identifying the assets in the system. The procedure that follows the identification of assets includes managing the inventory of the system, risk assessment, ranking them based on the risk factor, risk management, and making policies and processes for the management of the assets. The policies also ensure the correct identification of assets, documentation, protection, risk reduction, and compliance checks on assets.

2. Protect: The process of safeguarding the identified assets. Implementing the identified control policies, spreading awareness among the users, providing training to users, and providing security and maintenance for assets. It also provides data security and information protection. This step drafts the making of and using of the protective technologies.

3. Detect: The process of detecting anomalies, threats, and incidents in the normal working of the system. Implementation of continuous monitoring to detect all the vulnerabilities within the system. The detection process must be defined to monitor the system for continuously identifying vulnerabilities.

4. Respond: The response strategy against the identified vulnerabilities and threats within the system. The system has its defined Incident Response IR plan to respond to the anomalies within the system. The IR plan includes analysis, communication, and mitigation of the security threats identified in the system.

5. Recover: The process of recovering from the damage caused by the incident. The recovery process includes drafting the recovery plan, suggesting improvements in the system, and communicating the improvements and recovery system among the team. The recovery process also safeguards the system to make it more resistant to security threats.

This five-step process is an industry-standard cybersecurity compliance check. It is used as a base standard for ensuring the strength of cybersecurity in organizations. This industry standard serves as a good reputation point to gain customers.

Tiers

The tiers of the framework provide an overview of the maturity of the organization’s existing cybersecurity posture. The organization evaluates the level of security it offers, ranging from partial to adaptive. The range of the maturity of the organization’s security helps the organization to set a goal and standard toward further improving the security of the organization. The major metrics discussed in this decision are the risk appetite of the organization, its priority, and the budget allocated.

• Tier 1: Partial — Unsystematic and nonexistent risk management.

• Tier 2: Risk informed — Partial and incomplete risk management in place.

• Tier 3: Repeatable — Risk management with thorough policies and procedures.

• Tier 4: Adaptive — The risk management system is responsive and provides real-time solutions. The system is highly adaptive.

Profiles

Each organization has a unique alignment of profiles to improve the cybersecurity level. Profiles help align cybersecurity activities with business requirements, risk tolerance, and resources. This serves as a roadmap for the working of the steps of the framework.

Users of the framework

The NIST cybersecurity framework is extremely adaptive and works for organizations of all sizes and sectors. The framework is outcome-driven and has no particular way of how one should work towards achieving these outcomes, so it helps bring scalability to its implementation.

Any organization can customize their way of implementation based on their business requirement and goal of security. The flexibility in the implementation helps organizations implement risk management in their organization, which ranges from beginner level to a more mature level.

Quiz

To evaluate the level of understanding of the subject under discussion, solve the following activity to better grasp the steps in the NIST cybersecurity framework.