A First Look at Governments' Enterprise Security Guidance

To combat the deluge of enterprise breaches, government agencies have developed and published a wealth of cybersecurity guidance for organizations. However, little research has studied this advice. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic analysis of government guidance for enterprise security. We curate a corpus of prominent guidance documents from 41 countries and analyze the availability of advice, the coverage provided by the advice, and the consistency of advice across countries. To facilitate detailed analysis and comparisons, we develop a tree-based taxonomy and quantitative comparison metric, and then apply these tools to analyze "essential" enterprise best practice documents from ten countries. Our results highlight a lack of consensus among the governments' frameworks we analyzed—even among close allies—about what security measures to recommend and how to present guidance.