At trade shows and industry events, companies often roll out bold claims and interfaces, pushing the shiniest new thing to revolutionize cybersecurity. Amid all the noise, we often lose sight of the basics, and the fundamentals. A well-protected organization doesn’t just chase innovation; It also maintains a foundation in strong cyber hygiene.
In this blog, we define cyber hygiene and look at the concrete practices that support it. From internal protocols to external monitoring and response, cyber hygiene lays the groundwork for smarter security, long-term. We’ll walk through key lessons from senior experts, and spotlight solutions for levelling up your cyber hygiene. You can also get a free cyber hygiene audit right here.
What is Cyber Hygiene?
Good digital hygiene means implementing habits and systems that actively secure your organization’s digital perimeter. These include things like endpoint controls, system access rules, internal asset audits, and visibility tools that scan for threats across public and private networks. More than a checklist or awareness campaign, cyber hygiene builds resilience through repeatable, proactive behaviours and technology-led enforcement.
You need a strategy that goes beyond box-ticking exercises and PowerPoint presentations. Strong digital hygiene means keeping your assets aligned, your people following clear protocols, and your external landscape under continuous monitoring. It means patroling your domain landscape, updating DNS zone files, and enforcing strong authentication policies, without relying on gut instinct or chance. With that in mind, let’s explore five top tips to keep your organization up to date.
Digital Hygiene in Practice: Five Core Areas
To keep your organization clean of cyber threats, cyber hygiene must extend across your internal teams, vendor partnerships, and external attack surfaces. Here are five key takeaways:
Renewing Assets to Support Strong Cyber Hygiene
Cyber hygiene isn’t just about defence: It’s also about order. Growing companies build up plenty of digital assets, and it requires plenty of active hygiene to keep this infrastructure clean and tidy. Domains, Things like SSL certificates and DNS records quietly expire, leaving gaps that criminals exploit. Cybercriminals often pounce the moment your certificate lapses or a domain becomes available.
A reliable solution like Corporate Domain Management helps organizations maintain their digital hygiene and eliminate risk. Domain management delivers automatic renewal protocols, and helps configure CAA records to restrict unauthorised certificate issuance. The right domain solutions also maintains an organization’s defensive registrations in priority markets. By aligning renewals with cyber hygiene best practices, you reduce blind spots and prevent simple errors from turning into security incidents.
Monitoring Threat Surfaces
When it comes to cyber hygiene, threat monitoring can’t be underestimated. ENISA, the EU Cybersecurity Agency, advises organizations to «run regular scans to detect and remove threats» online in order to minimize risks and maximize resilience. As companies grow their digital presence, cybercriminals keep pace, finding new angles for infringements and attacks. Scammers register lookalike domains, upload spoofed apps, hijack social media accounts, and even sell stolen credentials on the dark web.
Strong cyber hygiene starts with visibility. Security teams need to collect data from as many sources as possible. That includes domain registrations, app store listings, social platforms, breach data, and dark web forums. Broad coverage increases the chance of spotting threats before they escalate. Beyond that, detection tools flag unusual activity, tag suspicious content, and assign risk scores based on impact. Teams can then focus on real threats instead of wasting time on background noise. When threats appear, enforcement tools should act quickly to block access, remove fake content, and limit exposure.
Monitoring keeps defence active and alert, building a strong foundation for digital hygiene. With the right insights, companies protect their digital assets and stay one step ahead of attackers.
Access Management: Staying Vigilant
Access control underpins every strong cyber hygiene strategy. When authentication weakens and loses consistency, it opens vulnerabilities for insider threats, account takeovers, and privilege misuse. Strong access management limits that risk.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) plays a key role in effective access management. This process verifies users with something they know, like a password, and something they have, such as a code or device. Adding extra layers like biometrics or device health checks builds additional resilience. When attackers guess or steal credentials, MFA often stops them cold.
Access management should also include clear policies: avoiding shared credentials, limiting admin rights, and reviewing permissions regularly. Pay close attention to tools that control your digital infrastructure, like domain registrars, DNS settings, and CMS platforms. These systems often carry outsized risk if misconfigured or exposed.
Strong cyber hygiene isn’t just about detecting threats. It starts with locking down who has access, and verifying they still need it. In fact, access control forms step one of our CTO’s seven-step guide to domain cybersecurity, as you can see here.
Internal Asset Configuration and Cyber Hygiene Standards
Internally, your cyber hygiene depends on disciplined configuration and documentation. Your DNS zone files should be version-controlled and up to date. You should implement DNSSEC for cryptographic trust, and enforce DMARC to reduce spoofing risk. Too often, vital infrastructure like zone files fall into disorganization and vulnerability, leaving foundational cybersecurity practice behind.
Digitally hygienic organizations audit their assets across email infrastructure, DNS, registrar portals, and certificate authorities. This process helps standardize their asset base, remove unused services, and align configurations with cybersecurity frameworks like NIS2. You cannot enforce what you cannot see, and cyber hygiene starts with full situational awareness.
Risk Scoring: Tailoring your Hygiene Regimen
Once your cyber hygiene programme is up and running, you need a way to assess its effectiveness and prioritise response. That’s where risk scoring comes in.
Risk scoring helps organisations weigh threats based on factors like likelihood, potential impact, exploitability, and exposure. Instead of treating all alerts equally, you focus on what matters most—streamlining your response and reducing noise.
Every organization should define its own risk scoring criteria. For some, that might mean ranking threats like:
• Cybersquatting and domain spoofing based on visual or textual similarity
• Fake mobile apps aimed at tricking your users
• Executive impersonations on social media
• Credential phishing via fake login portals
• Unauthorised brand or logo usage across marketplaces
These scores can shape daily decisions, whether to initiate a takedown, flag an internal risk, or escalate to legal. They also build longer-term insight, creating a feedback loop between detection and defence. Cyber hygiene isn’t just about catching infringements. It’s about knowing which ones demand action.
Why Cyber Hygiene Matters: The Benefits and the Risks
Strong cyber hygiene gives you clarity, confidence, and speed. It means you can track threats in real time, maintain secure configurations across domains and servers, and avoid the reputational and financial fallout of data leaks or impersonation campaigns. It reduces noise, streamlines incident response, and builds trust among customers, investors, and regulators.
Neglecting cyber hygiene, on the other hand, exposes you to silent vulnerabilities. Expired SSL certificates, unmonitored brand impersonation, unsecured admin accounts, and outdated DNS records create entry points for attackers. These aren’t just hypothetical risks. They’re recurring tactics in real-world breaches that bring down ecommerce sites, enable phishing scams, and trigger massive fines from regulators.
Conclusions: Cleaning Up With Your Organization
Cyber hygiene isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a strategic discipline that evolves with your threat landscape, your tech stack, and your regulatory environment. At EBRAND, we work with legal, security, and IT teams to assess gaps, recommend controls, and actively monitor the digital ecosystem for emerging threats.
Want to see where your vulnerabilities lie? Our team of experts provide a free cyber hygiene risk audit, giving you a clear view of your exposure and concrete next steps to improve your protection posture.
