Short answer: no. All eight strategies were designed for a threat that arrives. None of them look at what your staff type into a prompt.
Short answer: No. The Essential Eight is the right starting point for an Australian small business and you should work through it. But every one of the eight strategies is designed to stop something arriving on your machine or to limit what it can do once there. Not one of them looks at information leaving on purpose, typed by a member of your own staff into a tool they are allowed to use.
Key takeaways
The Australian Signals Directorate publishes eight mitigation strategies as a baseline for Australian organisations. They are: application control, patching applications, configuring Microsoft Office macro settings, user application hardening, restricting administrative privileges, patching operating systems, multi-factor authentication, and regular backups.
Each strategy is assessed against four maturity levels, from Maturity Level Zero, meaning minimally aligned with the intent of the strategy, up to Maturity Level Three, meaning fully aligned. The point of the levels is that this is a ladder rather than a pass or fail, which is what makes it usable for a firm of eight people rather than only for a government department.
It is genuinely good guidance. It is specific, it is free, it is written by the national authority rather than a vendor, and it is ordered so that the cheap high value items come first. If you have done none of it, stop reading this and go and do multi-factor authentication and backups.
Work through them one at a time with a single scenario in mind: a bookkeeper pastes a client's bank details into ChatGPT to summarise a statement.
Application control allows only approved programs to execute. The bookkeeper is using a browser, which is approved, on a website, which is not an executable. Nothing to control.
Patching applications and patching operating systems close known vulnerabilities. There is no vulnerability here. Everything is working exactly as designed.
Configuring Microsoft Office macro settings stops malicious code running inside a document. No macro is involved.
User application hardening blocks risky features such as Flash, ads and Java in browsers. It does not inspect what is typed into a text box.
Restricting administrative privileges limits the damage an account can do to systems. The bookkeeper does not need admin rights to type into a website.
Multi-factor authentication proves the person signing in is who they say they are. It works perfectly here. The person is exactly who they say they are, and they are doing the thing.
Regular backups let you recover after data is destroyed or encrypted. Nothing was destroyed. A copy was made somewhere you do not control, and backups have no answer to that.
Eight for eight, the strategy does what it was built to do and misses the event entirely.
No, and it is worth being clear about that, because plenty of vendor content uses this gap to imply the government advice is out of date and that you should buy something instead.
The Essential Eight was built around intrusion: someone or something trying to get in without permission. It is very good at that. What it was not built for is authorised people voluntarily sending information out through a channel the business has approved. That behaviour barely existed at scale when the model was written, and it is a different shape of problem, not a harder version of the same one.
ASD has continued to publish separate guidance on artificial intelligence rather than folding it into the eight, which is a reasonable signal about how they see the boundary.
Four things, none of which require an IT function.
Know which tools are in use. Ask, plainly, with no consequences attached. Most owners are surprised by both the number and by how much value people are getting.
Buy the accounts. If people are using personal free accounts because the business never provided one, that is a decision the business made showing up as risk the staff carry. A business plan gives you one set of terms to reason about.
Name what must never be pasted. Client identity documents, bank and card details, passwords and API keys. Four categories beat a policy nobody finishes reading.
Make the moment visible. Training decays within weeks, and it decays fastest under the time pressure that produces the risky paste in the first place. Something that catches it at the moment it happens does more than any amount of instruction.
Prinn does the last one. It runs on each person's computer and checks a prompt before it is sent. If it finds something sensitive it shows what it found and offers three choices: redact it, stop, or send it as is. The person decides, and it never blocks anyone. Prompt content never leaves the machine, including to us. An owner sees the category, the tool, the date, the device and the choice made, without reading anyone's prompts.
It is reliable on credentials, financial details and identity numbers. Names, home addresses and dates of birth written into ordinary prose are harder, and it is still improving at those.
Prinn is not a substitute for the Essential Eight and does not implement any part of it. Do both.
A firm sitting at Maturity Level One across the eight has meaningfully reduced its exposure to the attacks that actually hit Australian small businesses. That is a real achievement and most firms have not done it.
It has also not changed, by one per cent, the chance that someone pastes a client's tax file number into a chat window this afternoon. Both statements are true at the same time, and the second one is the reason this page exists.