Version 1.0.0 If you work in Australian IT, cybersecurity, or digital forensics, you've encountered the Essential Eight. It's referenced in government procurement requirements, security assessments, incident response frameworks, and organisational policies across both public and private sectors. The Australian Signals Directorate's Essential Eight is a set of eight baseline mitigation strategies designed to protect Windows environments against cyber threats. Checking compliance manually is time-consuming and error-prone. In this tutorial, you'll build a PowerShell script that automates Essential Eight audits, produces colour-coded console output, and writes detailed compliance reports to timestamped files. What You'll Build A PowerShell script called essential_eight.ps1 that checks a Windows system against all eight ASD mitigation strategies and produces a comprehensive audit report showing PASS/FAIL/WARN/INFO status for each control.…