Understand and Comply With Cybersecurity Standards to Protect Your Business

In this blog, we look at the crucial role of cybersecurity standards and compliance in business. Learn about steps for achieving compliance, scaling for different business sizes, and the benefits of safeguarding your operations against cyber threats.

Cybersecurity is not just a technical necessity but also a regulatory imperative for businesses across the globe. Understanding and complying with cybersecurity standards is crucial for protecting sensitive information and ensuring business continuity.

If your company has experienced a cybersecurity threat or breach, you are not alone. From the Department of Defense to small, mom-and-pop businesses – no one is ever completely protected.

In 2023, retail giant Target had to pay an $18.5 million settlement after hackers stole 40 million credit and debit records. Apple uncovered its biggest hack in history last November, where hackers targeted the company’s iCloud service to gain access to users’ photos, videos and other personal information. Despite building what was considered an “impenetrable” cyber framework, Anthem’s IT system was compromised through spear phishing emails sent to an Anthem subsidiary, providing hackers access to sensitive consumer information, resulting in one of the largest data breaches in history.

If no company is safe from cybersecurity breaches, how can you protect yourself?

How to Identify Cybersecurity Threats: Understanding the Importance of Cybersecurity Standards

Most cybersecurity threats, including malware and ransomware, are designed to compromise business systems to extort money or trick the target company into giving the hacker something of monetary value. While most attacks don’t focus on shutting systems completely down (unless politically motivated or possibly to protest a company’s way of doing business), the result is that, after a data breach, an affected company cannot continue doing business as usual.

The result of such a breach can be devastating. Companies face direct monetary losses and loss of client and public trust. When manufacturing companies can’t produce products and financial institutions can’t conduct transactions, it impacts their ability to do business. More important than the monetary impact, however, is the business impact. What happens to a company when it loses its data? Even if the data is recovered later, how confident can the company be that the data has not already fallen into the wrong hands?

In the case of ransomware, companies have to worry if their insurance providers will pay the ransom, and many don’t even have cyber insurance. With the average breach costing a company $500,000, this can have a major impact on the bottom line, not to mention client and consumer confidence.

For example, in 2020, a hacker accessed a customer’s Blackbaud-hosted database, and the breach went undetected for three months, allowing the person to remove massive amounts of unencrypted sensitive consumer data belonging to Blackbaud’s customers. Once the company detected the breach, Blackbaud agreed to pay a ransom of 24 Bitcoin, worth about $250,000, after the hacker threatened to expose the stolen data. There is no guarantee the hackers destroyed the data, however, since the company never verified that the hackers actually deleted it.

While cybersecurity standards can’t prevent every breach, they can reduce the likelihood of them happening and reduce the overall impact a breach can have on a business. For this reason, it’s important to know what data you need to protect and properly silo it off.

Steps to Achieve Cybersecurity Compliance

There are many widely recognized cybersecurity standards and regulatory frameworks available to businesses. These include ISO/IEC 27001, NIST, – CIS18, and TISAX, which are provided by authoritative sources that offer good layers of perspective and insight. These frameworks, some of which are free, are akin to a guide with advice on how to change your car’s oil. However, no one size fits all.

While building and articulating your controls to prevent people from targeting your business is essential, you need to scale your cybersecurity standards to appropriately meet your needs. While most companies don’t need protection on the level of Lockheed Martin, they may need more than Mama’s Bakery needs with its two employees. Most hackers are opportunists looking to find a vulnerability in the system. When you make this more difficult, they may move on to a different organization.

To make it more difficult for hackers to breach your system, it’s important to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment – usually by partnering with an objective external expert – and develop and implement a cybersecurity policy. At Centric Consulting, we measure risk using impact likelihood and essentially give our clients a score of their risk, then build thresholds to mitigate that risk. The goal is to apply controls or budgets to put that lever where the client needs it to be.

Start with what data you have that people care about – for example, a health system wants to protect health records, payment information, and social security numbers. If someone leaks that, the system has to report it to examiners and state auditors, pay fines, see their name in the paper, and, as a result, experience brand deterioration.

Once you understand what data people care about, apply controls to prevent them from getting it. It’s the same concept as putting an expensive watch in a safe versus placing it on a nightstand – you’re adding an extra layer of protection.

Note that you don’t have to protect everything. When you go to bed at night, you lock the doors but don’t worry about locking the second-story windows because no one is trying to reach them. It’s the same concept with data protection. Why protect what isn’t being targeted?

One of the weakest links in any company is its employees. Despite all efforts, it’s difficult to train and provide cybersecurity awareness programs for employees as most businesses have a revolving door of departures and new arrivals. As attempts to gain employee credentials become more sophisticated, it’s even more important to have a second layer of control to mitigate human error.

Deepfake services created through artificial intelligence are a prime example of a sophisticated approach. While an employee may think they are talking to someone they know on video, it can be a hacker phishing for credentials. Cybersecurity protocols need to consider these types of intrusions, stating that they require a second-step validation, such as a secret passphrase, no matter what the person may look or sound like.

Scaling for Different Business Sizes

While cybersecurity measures require continuous monitoring and updating, many companies can’t afford to keep a well-trained security officer on staff. For this reason, companies need to start with the basics and add layers of formalization, including policies and operating procedures, as they grow.

The fact is you don’t know what you don’t know. Many small businesses haven’t considered cybersecurity standards before filling out a cyber liability questionnaire. Larger companies may realize they need to improve cybersecurity standards and compliance issues after realizing they lack visibility into their data. The larger a company grows, the more stringent the requirements become. In certain industries, there are even regulatory requirements that compel companies to undergo an annual cybersecurity assessment to satisfy insurance protocols.

Cybersecurity tools and software can help companies achieve and maintain compliance by enabling policy and providing defense or visibility into risk.

It’s also helpful to get a second opinion, such as one provided by an objective external expert or even a virtual chief information security officer (CISO) who can validate the protections put into place or let a company know where it has missed the mark. With so much room for human error and subjectivity, it’s helpful to have someone with an equal or greater perspective review your protocols.

There are also considerations beyond cybersecurity standards that require attention. For example, security exception management may not appear in a framework or policy but can cause issues if that exception is breached. For example, if a CEO who is an avid golfer asks an employee to provide them with an exception to a golf site despite sports sites being blocked, it can open a company up to malware built into that golf site.

People Also Ask

How do I measure cybersecurity compliance?

Even if you have systems in place, it’s important to identify and address potential vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Penetration testing, also known as pen testing or ethical hacking, simulates real-world attacks on an organization’s systems, networks and web applications.

How do I train my employees to help maintain cybersecurity compliance?

In order to train employees in cybersecurity, you must first create clear policies and include them in your employee handbook so that they are easily accessible. Conduct regular training covering topics like phishing awareness, using IAM (identity access management), data protection and more. Keep employees up-to-date on emerging threats and industry trends and assess their knowledge through simulated phishing attacks or other tests to determine the effectiveness of the training.

When should I seek external help with my cybersecurity compliance efforts?

A company should seek external help when it needs an independent, objective view of how its system is working. An outside expert can bring a different perspective to cybersecurity compliance, resulting in a more thorough, comprehensive assessment.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter whether a business is ever breached. Maintaining compliance is critical. This not only minimizes any monetary risks to the company but also ensures client trust. Robust cybersecurity measures can even help companies negotiate lower cyber liability insurance rates when they can prove compliance.

Hackers find new ways to target companies every day, which is why it’s so important to understand and comply with cybersecurity standards. By taking a proactive approach to cyber protection, you can protect your data, your clients, and the company itself.

Data breaches and ransomware attacks threaten financial stability and customer trust that could impact your organization for years to come. Our Cybersecurity experts can help you address your most pressing cybersecurity issues and keep compliance a continuous commitment at your organization. Let’s Talk