Self-Employed? Solopreneur? NIST Has a Cybersecurity Guide Just for You

May something aimed at a average home-owner / individual -- dealing with a ton of digotal equipment from routers to Macs/PCs to home camera and security systems to smart TV and smart bidets could probably use of good use too (of course it may need update every few months though)

“The publication is an update to what was previously titled Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals (NISTIR 7621). While that publication was aimed at small businesses of varying sizes and covered the broader topic of information security, the revision is narrower in scope [...]”

The original publication is now withdrawn and replaced with this new one, which targets self-employed people / solopreneurs specifically. So, there is no current guide for small businesses anymore?

‘a lay-language resource‘.

IMO this misses the mark. Yes, it’s a decent attempt at simplifying cybersecurity, but if this is aimed at entry-level, non-technical people, it’s not gonna work.

One of my earliest jobs was to redesign training materials for one of the worlds largest companies. I stripped the training to its core, the true basics, and started there. The results were remarkable. I feel the urge to do the same with this document…

This is my first time seeing “SI” in the wild. That is such a wrong term. It’s jargon in a place where it doesn’t belong.

It’s a darn fancy algorithm and a cool tool. Putting it on a pedestal instead of grounding it to reality is not going to help anyone. My condolences to the authors.

I'm not a security expert.

Requests for comments from career security experts: is this any good?

As the target audience for this white paper, I’d appreciate HN’s take on the accuracy of this. Whether it misses something, deserves praise or any resources you can point out to make this advice even more actionable.

What’s your advice to a non-technical / non-tech savvy small business owner? Say, for example, people used to buy anti virus as a solution. What could they do now that resembles that?

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I work with lots of non-technical / non-tech savvy small business owners and many of them are showing concern. So, I’d love to share as much as possible with the people who are not Palo Alto networks clients.

There is no download button here, and when you find the page where there is a download button, it's tiny text and doesn't stand out.

Therefore, the laypeople this is aimed at will never find it.

I wonder how this relates to the ongoing ambiguity with CMMC 2.0 rollout.

Here is the actual PDF: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.50.pdf

If I see a document that uses "SI" seriously I'm going to treat everything in it with a very high degree of suspicion. Whatever people produced this document have clearly been required to kiss the ring by using the new federal mandate for SI, which makes its entire content suspect.

Hopefully the Canadian, Australian or some European governments have a better and functionally equivalent guide that can be better trusted not to mislead the reader.

I didn't review it, but i for one appreciate that at least there is an attempt to help small business owners in this area.

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Instead of a guide. Why not a prompt?

Guide loses all credibility when it uses "Super Intelligence"