What Cyber Essentials Actually Checks: A Plain-English Walkthrough of the Five Controls

Cyber Essentials is built around five controls. None of them are exotic. They are the basics that, in practice, stop the majority of everyday attacks.

Firewalls control what traffic can reach your network in the first place. Secure configuration means devices are not left running on default settings that make them easier to break into. Access control limits what each user account can actually do, so a compromised account cannot reach everything. Malware protection keeps known threats off your devices, and patch management closes the security gaps that vendors publish fixes for every month.

None of these controls are difficult individually. What Cyber Essentials does is force a business to prove all five are actually in place at the same time, rather than assuming they are.