If you work for yourself, protecting your business from cyberattack falls entirely on your shoulders. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a guide built for the busy “solopreneur” — anyone who is a business’s sole paid employee. Small Business Cybersecurity: Non-Employer Firms (NIST Cybersecurity White Paper 50) offers lay-language cybersecurity basics tailored to this group.
More than 28 million small businesses in the U.S. fall into the solopreneur category, spanning every industry and forming a substantial part of the economy. The publication updates Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals (NISTIR 7621) and narrows its focus to protecting digital systems from malicious attack, drawing guidelines from the well-known NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF 2.0).
“Because solopreneurs may not have cybersecurity expertise, we wanted to create a resource designed for them,” said NIST’s Daniel Eliot, one of the publication’s authors. The guide assumes no familiarity with cybersecurity and includes actionable best practices such as regular data backups, updated software, and changing default passwords on devices. It also provides worksheets, asset inventory tools, and three hypothetical use cases — a lawyer, an artisan, and a business consultant — to help solopreneurs plan their own cybersecurity strategy.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing