Organizations often struggle with budgeting for cybersecurity risk and mitigation. It’s hard to see the return on investment for prevention of things that attack the company through the clouds.

It is rare that help comes in the form of FREE services and tools offered by the federal government. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) rolled out free cybersecurity services and tools last week, “As part of our continuing mission to reduce cybersecurity risk across U.S. critical infrastructure partners and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments…to help organizations further advance their security capabilities.”

Although CISA admits the list is not comprehensive, is subject to change, and is not recommending any solution or promising that any of it will work, but it is still a valuable one-stop shop for basic cybersecurity hygiene that all companies may wish to consider in the context of their enterprise-wide plan.

The foundational measures that “all organizations should take” include:

• Fix the known security flaws in software;

• Implement multifactor authentication (MFA);

• Halt bad practices;

• Sign up for CISA’s Cyber Hygiene Vulnerability Scanning; and

• Get your Stuff Off Search (S.O.S.).

According to CISA, “after making progress on the above, organizations can use the free services and tools listed below to mature their cybersecurity risk management.”

The resources are listed according to four goals:

1. Reducing the likelihood of a damaging cyber incident;

2. Detecting malicious activity quickly;

3. Responding effectively to confirmed incidents; and

4. Maximizing resilience.

The list is thorough and impressive. It compiles helpful tools that have historically been available, but not all in one place. This is the start of a resource document that will be extremely helpful for information technology and security professionals. Kudos to CISA for understanding the need to compile all these resources in one place for cybersecurity professionals to access at one time. It is a huge savings on already-strapped professional’s time and resources. This exemplifies government dollars wisely used for a very important cause.