Are Your Cybersecurity Risk and Threat Assessments Effective?

In this blog, we explain how to evaluate and reduce your organization’s cybersecurity risk and improve threat assessments. Learn best practices, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure your security measures are truly effective in today’s evolving threat landscape.

How confident are you that your cybersecurity will protect you from an attack? Is there a chance your organization is vulnerable in ways you haven’t considered? A cybersecurity risk assessment against a framework can greatly reduce your cyber risks because it identifies the threats specific to your organization and prepares you to address them. This way, you can avoid expensive data breaches, outages and reputational damage.

Why Cybersecurity Risk and Threat Assessments Matter

The cybersecurity landscape is growing, particularly as more and more threat actors gain access to cyber weapons. For example, years ago, a hacker would have to have at least a decent understanding of basic coding principles to execute an attack. Now, however, an attacker can purchase and download a complete malware solution and launch it with a few clicks.

These and other cyberattack developments have increased the frequency and potency of digital assaults. But by performing a combination of risk and threat assessments, you position your organization to avoid many attack methods.

It’s important to understand the difference between a risk assessment and a threat assessment. A risk assessment identifies the vulnerabilities your organization and systems may have. A threat assessment is different because it focuses on the kinds of attacks hackers may levy against your company.

What’s Included in an Effective Cybersecurity Assessment?

A cybersecurity risk assessment is most effective when it obviously highlights the processes, tools and techniques you need to protect your organization. To do this, your assessments establish where you currently are when protecting your assets, which vulnerabilities you have, threats your organization faces, and which risks you need to prioritize.

You can build your system using three basic phases:

1. A comprehensive evaluation of your current security posture. For example, you may decide your cloud assets are relatively safe by virtue of your cloud provider’s protection, but perhaps your on-premise servers need a next-generation firewall between them and the internet.
2. Identification of vulnerabilities and threats and their potential impact. Sensitive data without encryption, excess access to private information, or outdated hardware or software all often pop up as vulnerabilities. Data exfiltration, malware attacks, and denials of service (DoS) often top the list of threats. Their impact can be expensive remediation, reputational damage, and fines.
3. Prioritization of risks based on your organization’s specific needs. Ultimately, there’s a direct correlation between the level of risk a threat or vulnerability poses and its financial cost to your company. But there may be risk events in between, such as work interruptions or downed payment systems, that build your risk past tolerable levels.

You can take action to reduce your risk while conducting assessments. By following these best practices, you make sure you don’t miss any potential red flags along the way:

• Regularly update your assessments. For example, your company may institute a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy. While performing a risk assessment, you may quickly realize each device introduces new vulnerabilities once it connects to your network.
• Collaborate across departments. Employees in different departments may have specific threats and vulnerabilities top of mind because they work in their environments daily. For instance, managers with administrative privileges may feel some on their teams don’t necessarily need the same level of access as they do.
• Use real-time data and threat intelligence. Threat intelligence systems constantly add new threats to their databases and share them with the public. By tapping into these resources, you can prepare for threats that would otherwise go unnoticed. Also, by streaming network data in real time, you can provide your teams with automated alerts regarding attacks.

Beware of Common Pitfalls in Cybersecurity Assessments

Cybersecurity assessments are, of course, fallible, but nothing magnifies their weaknesses more than the following pitfalls.

Outdated Assessment Methods

Some risk and threat assessments are obviously outdated, and others may seem up-to-date but aren’t. For example, an organization may perform annual threat assessments, only profiling the kinds of attacks they may face once a year. Considering the pace at which cyber threats change, you should perform these tasks far more frequently.

Some methods are outdated and potentially harmful, though they may not be as obvious at first glance. For example, using a risk matrix may leave gaping holes in your assessment system. A risk matrix outlines a company’s risks and includes columns for high, medium and low ratings. Then, company associates decide on the “ranking” of each risk.

This is, in itself, inherently risky. A matrix doesn’t include information about how a threat may change or how it impacts individual assets differently. Subjective speculation rather than objective data also drives the assessment.

Failure to Align Cybersecurity With Business Strategy

Unfortunately, some companies may have a culture that isolates cybersecurity, segmenting it away from general business strategy. This is dangerous for multiple reasons:

1. Employees need to incorporate cybersecurity measures in their day-to-day workflow. This may mean using technology differently and performing their jobs uniquely after seeing the results of a risk or threat assessment. By tying managers and other decision-makers into the assessment process, you can scaffold any adjustments their teams have to make.
2. You need to thoughtfully incorporate cybersecurity into your budget. Like other business-critical disciplines, cybersecurity needs a budget allocation, which may involve taking money from another department. Invariably, this will affect your organization’s business strategy. Therefore, invite a range of voices to participate in the assessment discussion.
3. Some strategic endeavors may increase your cyber risk. Some strategic moves may seem good for the business but could be detrimental to its cybersecurity. The team may have to reconsider these initiatives in response to a risk assessment. For instance, using certain software or hardware manufactured in specific countries could put you out of compliance with governmental policies. Aligning cybersecurity knowledge with business strategy can prevent potentially expensive mistakes.

Overlooking Human Error and Other Internal Threats

A password left exposed on a Post-It note can do as much damage as a successful phishing attack. The same goes for a phone without a secure locking mechanism that stores login credentials in its notes. Employee error is often a glaring yet unnoticed vulnerability. Using employee education and automated lockout mechanisms, however, you can significantly reduce the impact of employee mistakes.

Intentional internal threats may also slip off the radar, especially because it’s natural to trust those in your professional community. But you should carefully examine the access credentials of every employee and strategize ways to prevent them from using attacks against you or limiting the impact of a malicious action.

How to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Cybersecurity Assessments

There’s a lot you can do to increase the effectiveness of your cybersecurity assessments, often without investing excessive money, time or energy:

• Continuously monitor your environment and update your hardware and software. In this way, you alert yourself to new threats and prevent known vulnerabilities from increasing your risk.
• Involve all stakeholders, not just IT, in your assessment processes. Cybersecurity is a team effort, and the measures you take in response to assessments will invariably impact how many people do their jobs. Therefore, a range of stakeholders should sit at the table throughout your assessment lifecycles.
• Invest in cybersecurity tools that provide real-time risk analysis. Real-time risk analysis makes it easier to use data to improve your systems and adjust threats and vulnerability assessments as needed.
• Test and reassess regularly using attack simulations and penetration testing. A professional penetration tester may discover vulnerabilities you missed during your assessment. Attack simulations can provide similar insights but also tell you how ready your employees are to deal with cyberattacks.

Take the Next Step in Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

Success in any type of warfare requires proactive intelligence gathering. Fighting cyber battles is no different. By proactively performing risk and threat assessments, you gather intelligence about what attackers may target and the methods they’ll use to do so. Using this intelligence, you can strengthen your defenses, fine-tuning them to prevent hackers from penetrating your systems.

The first step is to evaluate your current processes. As you do so, think objectively about how effective your assessments are given the changing nature of the modern threat environment. Then, if you need to make changes, you can use cybersecurity risk assessment services to design a more comprehensive system.

You know you need to protect your brand and financial stability by prioritizing cybersecurity. But do you know where to start? Our Cybersecurity team is ready to help you focus on everything from strategy development to penetration testing.

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