General (Public) Information

General Information, also known as Public information, is data that is commonly found in marketing campaigns, emails, and print media and generally requires less protection of its confidentiality and availability than other categories of information.  General information still requires strong integrity controls to ensure your company’s message or public communications are on point, accurate, and in line with business objectives.

General information is anything that could be published in a newspaper without damaging the company it relates to.  This is in contrast to sensitive (aka: restricted) and critical (aka: confidential) information.  All three of these information handling labels should be codified in a company cybersecurity policy and published to employees to be aware of and follow.

What Should My SMB Do?

If you own a business, you need to be doing these basic things to protect your sensitive information:

1. Govern employees with policies and procedures. You need a password policy, an acceptable use policy, an information handling policy, and a written information security program (WISP) at a minimum.
2. Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks. Adopt a Learning Management system like CyberHoot to teach employees the skills they need to be more confident, productive, and secure.
3. Test employees with Phishing attacks to practice. CyberHoot’s Phish testing allows businesses to test employees with believable phishing attacks and put those that fail into remedial phish training.
4. Deploy critical cybersecurity technology including two-factor authentication on all critical accounts. Enable email SPAM filtering, validate backups, deploy DNS protection, antivirus, and anti-malware on all your endpoints.
5. In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections, etc) or prohibiting their use entirely.
6. If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
7. Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.

Most of these recommendations are built into CyberHoot. With CyberHoot you can govern, train, assess, and test your employees. Visit CyberHoot.com and sign up for our services today. At the very least continue to learn by enrolling in our monthly Cybersecurity newsletters to stay on top of current cybersecurity updates.

Related Terms: Critical Information, Sensitive Information

For more information about Information Asset Classification, please watch this video…