A deliberate method to prioritise threats is cybersecurity risk management. Organisations use cybersecurity risk management to guarantee that the most serious threats are dealt with quickly. This method aids in the identification, analysis, evaluation, and mitigation of risks based on their potential effect.
Organisations cannot completely eradicate all system vulnerabilities or prevent all cyber assaults, according to a risk management plan. Creating a cybersecurity risk management programme allows businesses to focus on the most serious issues, threat patterns, and assaults first.
The cybersecurity risk management process is divided into four stages:
Identifying risk entails assessing the organisation’s surroundings in order to detect present or prospective threats to its operations.
Assess risk – examining identified risks to determine how probable they are to affect the company and the potential consequences.
Define strategies, processes, technology, or other steps that may assist the company in mitigating risk.
Controls are reviewed on a regular basis to see how successful they are in mitigating risks, and controls are added or adjusted as appropriate.
What is the definition of a cybersecurity risk assessment?
A cybersecurity risk assessment is a procedure that assists businesses in determining important business objectives and then identifying the necessary IT assets to achieve those goals.
It entails identifying cyber threats that may have a detrimental effect on these IT assets. The organisation must assess the probability of these assaults occurring and the potential consequences of each attack.
A cybersecurity risk assessment should lay out the full threat landscape and how it affects the organisation’s business goals.
The assessment’s findings should help security teams and other stakeholders make educated choices about how to adopt security measures to reduce these risks.
What Are the Dangers of Cyberspace?
Any vector that may be exploited to compromise security, inflict harm to the company, or exfiltrate data is referred to as a cyber threat.
Modern companies face a variety of threats, including:
Third-party vendors, insider threats, trustworthy insiders, established hacker collectives, privileged insiders, ad hoc organisations, suppliers, corporate espionage, and nation-states are all examples of adversarial threats. Malicious software (malware) generated by any of these organisations also falls under this category. Large enterprises may counteract these attacks by building a security operations centre (SOC) with skilled security personnel and specialised software.
Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, fire, and lightning are among natural calamities that may do as much harm as a malevolent cyber attacker. A natural catastrophe may result in data loss, service interruption, and the destruction of a company’s physical or digital assets. Natural catastrophe risk may be reduced by spreading an organisation’s activities over many physical locations or using dispersed cloud resources.
System failure—when a system fails, it may result in data loss and an interruption in business continuity. Check that your most essential systems are operating on high-quality hardware, have redundancy in place to guarantee high availability, are backed up, and that your suppliers provide fast assistance.
Any user might unintentionally download malware or be duped by social engineering tactics such as phishing attacks. A storage misconfiguration might disclose confidential information. Establish a personnel training programme and maintain robust security policies to avoid and minimise these dangers. Use password managers, for example, and keep an eye on vital systems for misconfigurations.
The following are main danger vectors that most companies face:
Malicious attacks, malware, and staff mistakes may all lead to unauthorised access.
Authorised users misusing information—an insider threat may abuse information by modifying, destroying, or utilising data without permission.
Personal identifiable information (PII) and other sorts of sensitive data may be leaked as a result of threat actors or cloud misconfiguration.
Data loss—badly designed replication and backup operations may result in data loss or erasure.
Service interruption—downtime may harm your reputation and cost you money. It might have happened by chance or as a consequence of a denial of service (DoS) assault.
Frameworks for Cyber Risk Management
There are various cyber risk management frameworks available, each of which gives guidelines for identifying and mitigating threats. These frameworks are used by senior management and security executives to examine and enhance the organisation’s security posture.
Organisations may use a cyber risk management framework to analyse, mitigate, and monitor hazards, as well as establish security policies and procedures to handle them. The following are some of the most widely used cyber risk management frameworks.
NIST CSF
A common framework is the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF). The NIST CSF framework establishes a complete set of risk management best practices. Protect, detect, identify, react, and recover are the main tasks of cybersecurity risk management, and it outlines a map of actions and results connected to them.
ISO 27001
In collaboration with the International Electrotechnical Commission, the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) developed ISO/IEC 270001. (IEC). The ISO/IEC 270001 cybersecurity framework is a collection of standards that may be verified and used to systematically manage information system risks. The ISO 31000 standard, which gives principles for corporate risk management, may also be used by businesses.
DoD RMF
The Risk Management Framework (RMF) of the Department of Defense (DoD) establishes rules for identifying and managing cybersecurity threats. The cyber risk management approach is divided into six phases by RMF: classify, choose, implement, evaluate, authorise, and monitor.
FAIR Guidelines
The Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) methodology was created to assist businesses in measuring, analysing, and comprehending information hazards. The purpose is to assist businesses through the process of developing cybersecurity best practises by helping them make educated choices.
Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Best Practices
Integrate cybersecurity into your enterprise risk management strategy.
Integrate your risk-based cybersecurity programme completely into the enterprise risk management framework, which serves as the organisational basis for assessing and categorising business risks. The framework should be utilised as the organising concept rather than a generic guideline. This method makes cyber risk management more understandable to organisations by presenting it as a business issue.
Identify Workflows That Add Value
Identify the processes that provide the most value to the company and their related risks. It’s necessary to think about the effect of critical processes, since they may potentially be a substantial risk. Payment procedures, for example, provide value but also pose a company risk since they are subject to fraud and data leaks.
Make sure your cybersecurity team understands which processes are important to your company and the components (data assets, tools, and people) involved in each one. This enables you to use the suggested controls. The one-sided maturity-based strategy is less successful than a collaborative one incorporating both cybersecurity and business people.
Prioritise Cyber Security Threats
To guide your risk management and mitigation techniques, determine the degree of risk based on the cost of prevention and the value of information. High-level risks should be handled right once, whilst low-level hazards may be addressed later or accepted as acceptable risks. If the cost of safeguarding an item exceeds its value, the investment is not justified unless the danger poses a threat to your reputation.
Continuous Risk Assessments should be implemented.
To stay up with developing cybersecurity threats and solutions, perform continuous, adaptive, and actionable risk identification and assessment. Review risk management procedures on a regular basis to identify and address gaps. To safeguard digital environments and assets, cybersecurity professionals depend on actionable insights from risk assessments.
ServerLT.com’s Cybersecurity Risk Management
ServerLT.com can assist businesses in identifying and managing cybersecurity threats in two areas: application security and data security.
Application Security by ServerLT.com
ServerLT.com offers complete application, API, and microservice protection:
Web Application Firewall — Prevent attacks by analysing web traffic to your apps in real time.
RASP (Real-Time Application Self-Protection) — Real-time attack detection and prevention from your application runtime environment follows your apps everywhere they go. Reduce your vulnerability backlog by preventing foreign assaults and injections.
API Security – Automated API security guarantees that your API endpoints are secured against exploitation as soon as they are released.
Advanced Bot Protection – Stop business logic assaults across all points of access, including websites, mobile applications, and APIs. Stop online fraud such as account takeover or competitive pricing scraping by gaining complete visibility and control over bot traffic.
DDoS Protection – Block attack traffic at the edge for assured uptime and minimal performance effect. Whether you’re using AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Public Cloud, protect your on-premises or cloud-based assets.
Attack Analytics – Ensures total visibility throughout the application security stack using machine learning and domain knowledge to uncover patterns in the noise and detect application assaults, allowing you to isolate and prevent attack campaigns.
Client-Side Security — Gain access and control over third-party JavaScript code to avoid supply chain fraud, data breaches, and client-side assaults.
Data Security ServerLT.com
ServerLT.com secures all cloud-based data repositories to guarantee compliance while preserving the agility and cost savings that come with cloud investments.
Cloud Data Security – Streamline the security of your cloud databases to stay up with DevOps. Users of cloud-managed services may quickly obtain visibility and control of cloud data using ServerLT.com’s solution.
Database Security — ServerLT.com provides analytics, protection, and response for all of your data assets, whether on-premise and in the cloud, providing you the risk visibility you need to avoid data breaches and compliance violations. Integrate with any database for real-time visibility, uniform policies, and faster time to value.
Data Risk Analysis — To speed up remediation, automate the identification of non-compliant, dangerous, or malicious data access activity across all of your databases.