Due to the increasing number of security breaches and their devastating effect on businesses, cybersecurity has become a persistent business risk.
As companies evolve from security to cybersecurity risk management, information security professionals often struggle with identifying and prioritizing cybersecurity-related risks. According to information security experts, in most cases, security controls are reactive due to the fact that they are deployed after a security incident. This is an indication of a lack of a clearly-defined cyber risk management approach to identify the organization’s risk appetite and implement the appropriate security controls. So then the question becomes:
How do you know what security controls are required to protect your organization’s information assets if you don’t know the threats you are facing? Cybersecurity controls are the practices and processes used to protect assets, infrastructure, and information by implementing preventive, detective, and corrective controls to mitigate the risk.
A cyber security risk assessment is necessary to identify the gaps in your organization’s critical risk areas and to determine actions to close those gaps. All industries are at some stage in the security maturity model.
Some industries, such as banks and financial institutions, are required to perform a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment to monitor and maintain sufficient awareness of cyber threats and vulnerability information. Other industries such as maritime are now being steered in adopting and establishing a cyber security program. Adhering to a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment will help maintain a strong security posture and will certainly help companies assess the risks in order to determine if risks can be controlled or mitigated. The following are some tips and best practices to help you build a strong cybersecurity risk management program: 1. Identify and classify information assets Identify your organization’s information assets (hardware, software, including applications, versions and patch levels, data, etc.) and classify them in order of criticality. This will give you a better perspective to help you determine what assets are the most critical to your organization, and therefore, should be given the highest priority when developing your risk management strategy. 2. Conduct a baseline risk assessment Take a ‘‘snapshot’’ of the organization’s current state by performing a risk assessment to determine if current controls are adequate and effective, and/or if additional compensating controls to address the risk are necessary. 3. Identify Threats and Threat Agents It is always important to understand which threats present a risk to your organization. Remember, each threat presents a unique challenge. Therefore, performing a thorough analysis to include vulnerabilities, impact and likelihood will be helpful to help you map threats to assets and vulnerabilities. 4. Review your security controls Now that you have identified your critical assets, potential weaknesses, and have a better understanding of threats and vulnerabilities, it is time to review and enhance security controls. This step of the process will help you determine if preventive, detective, and/or corrective controls need to be strengthened to enhance the efficacy and effectiveness. 5. Re-assess on an ongoing basis As the threat landscape changes, it is important to develop a process to periodically re-assess and evaluate your program in order to enhance your cyber security risk management posture. To summarize, whether you are just beginning your cybersecurity program journey or are a company with years of experience, remember what a security assessment can do for your organization:
Secure your applications
Discover exposed assets
Comply with laws and regulations
Optimize cyber security spending
Fortify the infrastructure
Anticipate vulnerabilities
Prevent IT issues
Enable business responses
Protect business reputation
And remember, you will be in better position to find and remediate weak spots that include
Assess cyber security levels
Determine possible outcomes
Remedy deployment
Retest initial vulnerabilities
One last note, with more jobs unfilled than current cyber talent available in today’s security market, many companies have adopted partnering with consulting firms and managed services providers to fill this void and build their risk management platform.
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