Raising Your Cyber Security Maturity: Where Do You Stand?

Cyber hygiene refers to the day-to-day practices that prevent the most common and opportunistic attacks:

• Applying software patches and updates on time

• Enforcing strong, multi-factor authentication

• Managing user accounts and access rights carefully

• Keeping reliable backups and tested recovery plans

• Providing security awareness training to employees

These practices may not make headlines, but neglecting them often opens the door to serious breaches. A checklist helps ensure that these basics are consistently applied across the organization.

But hygiene alone isn’t enough. An organization must grow its security maturity and strengthen resilience—the ability to detect and respond to attacks quickly, and to recover as efficiently as possible. In practice, this means developing Detection & Response capabilities and ensuring robust recovery in critical situations.

Beyond hygiene, every organization should assess its security maturity. Maturity reflects how structured and proactive your approach is:

• Is security still reactive – fixes happen only after something goes wrong?

• Or is it embedded in processes, assessed regularly, and continuously improved?

The WithSecure checklist lets you benchmark your current maturity level and identify the next steps. It turns isolated activities into a continuous, measurable program and is structured around four pillars:
 

1. Foundations – get the basics right
2. Visibility and response
3. Hardening and deepened monitoring
4. Testing and certification

Across these pillars there are 42 concrete action boxes. Each box uses traffic-light indicators that show at a glance:

• Cost/Effort (time and budget impact)

• Maturity impact (how much the action raises your maturity)

This helps you quickly spot quick wins (low cost, high impact) and strategic investments (higher effort, significant maturity leap) within each pillar – moving the organization from a reactive model to a higher, systematic maturity.

A crucial point often overlooked is the importance of small gaps. Even when most areas are covered, one overlooked misconfiguration, outdated application, or overly permissive account can become the critical entry point an attacker needs.

Think of it like a small crack in a dam – it might seem insignificant at first, but under pressure it can cause a major breach. Attackers thrive on chaining together small oversights into a path that leads to valuable systems and data. A checklist makes these gaps visible before they can be exploited.

A comprehensive checklist provides:

• A quick snapshot of your current cyber security posture

• Clarity on which issues truly need attention first

• A common framework that works across industries and geographies

• An easy way to align IT, security, and leadership on next steps

Most importantly, it allows you to turn vague concerns into concrete, actionable priorities.

Improving cyber security doesn’t allways mean expensive tools or complex projects. It starts with ensuring the fundamentals are in place and identifying where small gaps might exist.

Download the WithSecure Cyber Security Checklist and take the first step toward stronger cyber hygiene and higher maturity.