Effective cybersecurity starts with understanding your risks. This blog explores how a robust cybersecurity risk assessment forms the foundation of a successful assessment risk cybersecurity program, enabling you to prioritize vulnerabilities and fortify your defenses against evolving threats.
Cyber threats are evolving — are your defenses keeping up? A defensive stance is an informed stance. We’ve prepared this guide to cybersecurity risk assessment as a resource to help you develop your risk assessment strategy and strengthen your cybersecurity program.
Understand Cybersecurity Risk
Cybersecurity risk encompasses all potential losses an organization could face due to a cyber threat. It often involves financial losses and operational interruptions caused by an attack or a breach.
Judging from the variety of targets, it appears no one is safe. In late January 2025, New York Blood Center Enterprises (NYBCe) was hit by a ransomware attack. The assault disrupted blood donation services, not only in the New York area but across the country. NYBCe isn’t a huge, multi-national organization, large utility, or another “typical” target of ransomware attackers. But that doesn’t matter. Any organization with data and computerized systems can fall into attackers’ crosshairs.
You can avoid becoming the next headline by performing a cybersecurity risk assessment. However, a cybersecurity risk assessment also has to consider the costs of repairing damage caused by a breach and the effects of a weakened reputation with customers and investors.
The simplest way to understand the nature of cybersecurity risk is to break it down into three elements: threats, vulnerabilities, and the impact of an incident:
- Threats refer to the people or malware that could hurt your cybersecurity.
- Vulnerabilities are the weaknesses in your digital infrastructure that the threats can exploit.
- The impact of an incident refers to what happens due to an attack or other incident.
Not all vulnerabilities pose the same risk, so it’s important to analyze each one in the context of the impact it would have if exploited by an attacker. This way, you can develop a more detailed, actionable picture of your cybersecurity risk.
Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Is the Foundation of an Actionable Risk Evaluation
For organizations looking to tighten their cybersecurity, performing a risk assessment is step one. With a cybersecurity risk assessment in hand, you can design an actionable model that informs your overall strategy.
It’s easy to confuse a risk analysis with cybersecurity risk assessment services, but they’re distinct:
- Risk assessment involves focusing on the impact of a specific threat and the related vulnerabilities that may increase the cost or operational fallout of each event.
- Risk assessment, also sometimes referred to as a cybersecurity gap assessment, is more in-depth because it involves evaluating each risk and prioritizing it according to how it may affect your organization.
To illustrate the difference, consider the following examples of cybersecurity risk assessment and risk analysis:
- Risk analysis. Your team assesses the risk posed by a whale phishing attack on one of your executives. You focus on the kinds of information an attacker could steal and how they might use it.
- Risk assessment. As a team, you identify several risks and compare their potential impact, analyzing each risk first. You determine that phishing attacks pose a relatively low risk because employees don’t have access to sensitive data. However, SQL attacks, privilege escalation, and credential stuffing pose significant risks because you have a central, business-critical database.
Conduct a Risk Assessment
Conducting a risk assessment can be fairly straightforward if you use the following steps:
- Identify your most critical assets. These include those whose compromise would result in the greatest losses or operational disruptions.
- Analyze the threats that could impact those assets. For instance, a ransomware attack may be a high-priority threat for a central server, but it may have less impact on an employee’s mobile device.
- Assess the vulnerabilities that make it more likely for each threat to have a significant impact. This could involve specific systems, such as an on-premise-hosted customer relationship management (CRM) system. However, industry-level vulnerabilities are different. For instance, manufacturers need to protect servers used to manage their assembly lines from DDoS attacks, but financial institutions must protect customer-facing web apps from hackers.
- Evaluate and prioritize risks. This is where a risk matrix or a similar tool comes in handy because it helps you assess your risks. You can then prioritize the most crucial risks and decide which ones to address first, second, third, and so forth.
The Importance of an Industry-Specific Risk Assessment
A risk assessment is only effective if it considers the risks most applicable to your industry and organization. Here are some considerations to keep top of mind as you make sure your cybersecurity risk assessment is tailored to your industry:
- Identify the most attractive assets in your industry. Cybercriminals targeting financial companies may be after different assets than those targeting utilities. By pinpointing the assets criminals assume – or know – they can target based on your industry, your assessment can keep you a step ahead of attackers.
- Pinpoint the threats most common to your industry. A company with a web-based app may be a prime target for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacker looking to cripple their online operations. On the other hand, a power company may look more attractive to ransomware attackers who know how detrimental downtime is for the citizens the company serves.
- Focus on industry-specific risks. While a healthcare organization may face the risk of loss of life due to an attack, a financial services company may have to focus more on the risks associated with stolen payment information. Taking the time to assess your industry-specific risks helps narrow the focus of your assessment.
How Threat Modeling Informs Risk Modeling
Your risk assessment process involves both threat modeling and risk modeling. The two are intimately intertwined: Threat modeling informs risk modeling. In other words, you make a threat model and then use it to develop your risk model. Here’s a basic definition of each to make it easier to understand how the two work together:
- Threat modeling is pinpointing the threats and vulnerabilities your organization may face. Organizations often model the threats posed by individual network components or applications.
- Risk modeling involves applying information from your threat models to determine how they affect your overall risk.
For example, suppose a utility has a customer-facing web app. Customers have to enter basic information, such as their name and contact info, as they build their profiles. As part of the threat modeling process, the team identifies a high-priority threat: SQL attacks.
They also outline how an attacker might use an SQL assault against the utility’s web app. For instance, a hacker could simply input malicious SQL code in the “Name” field that modifies the authentication process, making it so all entries evaluate to “true.” Then, they could log in and steal user information at will.
Next, the team uses this information to inform its risk modeling. The risk model may use this information like this:
- Risk event: SQL injection
- Likelihood of risk event: High
- Impact of risk event: Significant – Attackers could steal sensitive data, change core database functions, and alter the contents of the database. They could also adjust the authentication system to lock employees out as a preliminary step in a ransomware attack.
- Strategy or tool for mitigating risk event: Input validation (validate the contents of every entry field before accepting submissions to make sure they don’t include any malicious SQL code)
By identifying the threat during threat modeling, the team can focus on its impact and how to mitigate it during risk modeling.
Bridging the Gaps: Risk Mitigation Strategies
Once you’ve performed a cybersecurity risk assessment, it’s time to put it into action by using your insights to establish a risk mitigation strategy. Here are some strategies many successful companies use to mitigate their cyber risks.
- Implementing security controls. Security controls, such as next-generation firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption, directly address specific risks and empower you to protect your systems better.
- Employee training. By training your employees to recognize phishing and other attacks that leverage human error, you empower them to defend your organization and its digital assets from a wide range of threats.
- Incident response planning. The steps you take as an incident occurs can drastically reduce — or eliminate — the damage caused. For instance, if an employee’s computer starts running extremely slowly and they see random pop-ups, do they know who to reach out to and whether they should continue working on that device?
The Value of a Risk-Driven Approach
The risk-driven approaches of successful organizations are always evolving, just like the risks themselves. By evolving your approach, you avoid falling behind and exposing your company to unnecessary risk.
For example, the SolarWinds attack highlighted the risk of supply chain-based attacks. Therefore, at the time, it made sense to focus on third-party risk assessments and ensure vendors didn’t introduce compliance issues.
But that was five years ago. While supply-chain attacks are still a top concern, it also makes sense to pay attention to AI-powered deepfakes. Whale phishing and spear phishing are far easier for attackers who can use AI to imitate the faces, voices, and writing styles of trusted people in your organization or its partners. For many companies, it would make sense to redesign their payment approval and information-sharing protocols accordingly.
A risk-driven approach tailored to your industry gives you more actionable results than a generic, overarching cybersecurity strategy, especially because it adds specificity to your assessment process. This results in:
- A more proactive security stance. Instead of buying tools and hoping they reduce your vulnerabilities, you systematically assess and then address specific risks.
- Resource optimization. Hyper-focusing on unimportant risks may result in wasted time, money and human resources. But with a risk-driven approach, you identify the risks most worthy of your time, effort and funds.
- Informed decision-making. Should you segment your network? Update your encryption protocols? Shift your dev process to the cloud? A risk-driven approach makes deciding which moves will significantly impact your cyber safety easier.
- Business alignment. A hospital may need a robust intranet powered by an SD-WAN solution. But are the risks associated with this infrastructure significant enough to impact how the team builds it? A risk-driven approach surfaces these kinds of issues so you can deal with them head-on before they result in problems.
Expert Support for Cybersecurity Risk Assessment
Conducting a comprehensive risk assessment can be challenging, especially because it involves quantifiable, reliable risk assessment, and modeling.
For many organizations, modeling the fallout from a ransomware attack, for instance, can be extremely challenging. There are different kinds of ransomware threats, so you may have to create multiple models, such as one for an assault on an on-premise server, another for one that focuses on your HR department’s system, and another for the computers your development team uses.
This is why many winning companies partner with cybersecurity experts. With years of experience analyzing risks and using this data to perform risk assessments, seasoned professionals understand what to look out for and how to quantify the impact of different incidents.
Our on-demand webinar showcases the importance of a comprehensive penetration test – beyond simply meeting compliance requirements – through a live network attack simulation.
Secure your organization’s future with a risk-based cybersecurity strategy. Contact us today to get started
