How Cyber Risk Management Enhances Your Cybersecurity Strategy
Mapping out a cybersecurity plan begins by identifying which data and business-critical assets are at the highest risk. And that’s a long process.
According to a recent study, it takes an average of 4.5 months to remediate critical vulnerabilities. Time is of the essence when it comes to containing and mitigating these threats. But more importantly, can you accurately predict which vulnerabilities are worth mitigating and which will appear as a loss on your balance sheet?
Where does a CISO begin?
You can’t build an effective cybersecurity strategy for the future without having a risk management plan from the outset.
Cyber risk management is the foundation that enables organizations to identify, assess, prioritize, and mitigate risks that directly impact ROI. In this blog, we’ll explore various best practices and cyber frameworks that will help enhance your cybersecurity strategy.
4 Best Practices of Risk Management to Enhance Your Cybersecurity Strategy
Here are several ways to safeguard business-critical assets while staying a few steps ahead of threat actors.
1. Conduct a thorough cyber risk assessment
Risk mitigation begins by knowing which business-critical assets to prioritize. A cyber risk assessment provides a detailed inventory of all potential threats and vulnerabilities that may impact your most critical assets. Mitigating low-priority threats can deplete both resources and budget in a heartbeat.
If your servers were to go offline unexpectedly, the impact could be severe. Can your organization handle 12 hours of downtime? Probably not. A cyber risk assessment can provide visibility into potential threats compromising your organization’s critical operations and data.
A study conducted by ISACA found that companies are failing to regularly assess cyber risk, with less than one in ten (8%) of organizations completing cyber risk assessments monthly, while two in five (40%) conducting them annually. More emphasis should be placed on regular cyber risk assessments to empower security professionals with a head start in mitigation efforts and planning.
2. Maintain compliance
Data privacy and regulatory compliance are mandatory requirements for an organization. Noncompliance penalties highlight the importance even further. The consequences extend beyond monetary loss, as they can lead to negative brand perception and reputational damages among customers.
Maintaining compliance best practices and performing routine audits can help protect the three pillars of security, commonly referred to as the CIA Triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Cyber risk assessments can show you where vulnerabilities exist within your systems and processes. Data classification is another key element of maintaining compliance, as it categorizes data based on sensitivity and importance. This ensures that appropriate security controls are applied to protect data according to its level of risk.
3. Create an incident response plan
A cybersecurity crisis can occur at a moment’s notice. That’s why it’s crucial to have a strategy playbook pre-incident to post. Begin by establishing clear roles and responsibilities for incident response team members with detailed procedures on how to mitigate the incidents. Conduct regular drills to test and refine the plan. Select a team leader who will manage the incident and create channels of communication to keep all relevant team members in the loop. Track KPIs such as:
- Cost per Incident
- Number of Incidents Detected
- Number of Incidents Resolved
- Post-Incident Review Completion Rate
- Mean Time to Contain (MTTC)
And be sure to check out our Cyber Talks Workshop on Shaping Your Incident Response Plan to gain more insights.
4. Limit access to third parties
Access permissions should not be granted openly to anyone within the organization, especially not with third-party vendors. Research found that 82% of companies give third parties access to all cloud data with highly privileged roles. If access permissions aren’t restricted, an organization’s cloud environment might be at constant risk of a breach.
One way of preventing cloud-based security breaches is by granting granular access or revoking excessive permissions to third-party vendors when managing cloud environments. The same theory applies to employees and former employees to prevent insider threats such as espionage or fraud.
Cybersecurity Governance Frameworks: The Blueprint for Risk Management Success
Effective cyber risk management begins by following best practices and industry protocols, such as COBIT, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), and CIS Controls to stay ahead of emerging threats.
These frameworks also provide CISOs with a solid foundation in cybersecurity governance for building a long-term cybersecurity strategy.
Let’s dive deeper into two specific cyber frameworks, NIST CSF and CIS Controls.
NIST CSF
NIST CSF outlines six core functions that any organization can implement regardless of size. The sixth function of “Govern” was recently introduced and emphasizes the need for ongoing cyber risk management. Here is a summary of each function:
- Govern: Establishing cybersecurity strategies and policies
- Identify: A clear understanding of all assets with the highest business risks
- Protect: Safeguarding of critical infrastructure
- Detect: Discovery of threats and Indicators of Compromise (IOC)
- Respond: Implementing incident management and mitigation plans of action
- Recover: A backup plan to restore all lost data and operations post-incident
Security leaders can leverage the NIST CSF to build an Organizational Profile that describes the current cybersecurity posture and areas of improvement based on business objectives, stakeholder expectations, and the threat landscape. Organizational Profiles are comprised of Current and Target profiles – with the latter representing how an organization anticipates changes.
These changes include adopting new cybersecurity tools and staying up-to-date with the latest threat intelligence trends, such as AI-generated phishing attacks and advanced persistent threats (APTs). Organizational Profiles also ensure that cybersecurity practices and policies remain relevant over time. This is crucial because integrating new cybersecurity solutions can potentially introduce new vulnerabilities across the corporate network.
Continuous monitoring is essential to ensure that vulnerabilities are quickly identified and mitigated and that incident response plans are updated to include procedures for dealing with these new threats.
CSF Tiers focus more on the risk governance aspect and the ability to manage those risks. Each tier is broken down into several sections of cyber risk awareness and cyber program maturity.
CSF Tiers
Tier 1: Partial
- Basic risk management awareness
- Initial discovery of cyber risks
- Identifies opportunities for improvement
Tier 2: Risk-Informed
- Policies are documented
- Prioritized responses based on risk severity
- Stakeholder engagement and communication begins
Tier 3: Repeatable
- Proactive risk management strategies
- Updates policies and procedures
- Decisions become data-driven off insights
Tier 4: Adaptive
- Conducts thorough cyber risk assessments
- Leverages advanced incident response capabilities
- Cyber resilience is built throughout the organization
But what happens in the event of a security incident? Is everyone fulfilling their responsibilities when it comes to risk management?
NIST CSF helps address this question and ultimately bridges the communication barrier between security practitioners and the C-Suite so that each key stakeholder is 100% aligned with risk management goals and individualistic responsibilities.
CIS Controls
CIS Controls were designed to help an organization adjust its cybersecurity strategies and practices with 18 controls encompassing all potential risk areas.
There are 18 CIS Controls as of the latest version. Each control provides specific guidelines and actions to enhance various aspects of cybersecurity, from asset inventory control to data recovery and security awareness training, it covers every corner.
Here are the 18 CIS Controls and a brief description of what each control does:
- Control 1: Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets
- Control 2: Inventory and Control of Software Assets
- Control 3: Data Protection
- Control 4: Secure Configuration of Enterprise Assets and Software
- Control 5: Account Management
- Control 6: Access Control Management
- Control 7: Continuous Vulnerability Management
- Control 8: Audit Log Management
- Control 9: Email and Web Browser Protections
- Control 10: Malware Defenses
- Control 11: Data Recovery
- Control 12: Network Infrastructure Management
- Control 13: Network Monitoring and Defense
- Control 14: Security Awareness and Skills Training
- Control 15: Service Provider Management
- Control 16: Application Software Security
- Control 17: Incident Response Management
- Control 18: Penetration Testing
Although both frameworks serve as foundational security starting points that can help you map out your current risk posture, they aren’t a substitute for proactive cybersecurity measures such as cyber risk quantification, incident response planning, or threat modeling.
How to Build a Complete Cybersecurity Resilience Strategy
Attackers are getting even more sophisticated. That’s a phrase you hear quite often, but it’s true.
Those old security controls and excessive access permissions can give an attacker a clear entry path to exfiltrate sensitive data and disrupt your business operations.
We’ve outlined a step-by-step process to get inside the mind of an attacker to determine the likelihood of a breach and help you make more data-driven decisions by quantifying those risks.
Attack route visualization
Risk mitigation efforts become more valuable when you’re able to trace a potential attack from the perspective of a threat actor or red team. Something as “minor” as a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket or weak password policy significantly increases the probability of a breach. A recent study found that 21% of all publicly exposed S3 buckets contained sensitive data that attackers can exploit.
CISOs can benefit tremendously from having a visual representation and mapped attack route that a potential threat actor might take before they carry out an attack. CYE’s Hyver platform provides these insights, highlighting the critical business assets that require immediate attention. It also offers technical insights into risky employee behavior, inactive third-party vendors, and access permissions that may lead to a breach. These insights provide valuable context for risk mitigation efforts and the potential for an attacker to exploit security gaps.
Cyber risk quantification
Cyber risk quantification addresses where you should focus risk mitigation efforts based on the highest impact to your critical business assets. Cyber risk quantification also enables security practitioners to assign assets with risk scores based on levels of severity.
This is especially important as it predicts the actual mitigation costs associated with those high-level business assets at risk. CRQ can also leverage the Monte Carlo simulation to forecast outcomes of future losses over the years based on event scenarios and other factors, such as attack vectors, average annual loss, and the recommended actions to take.
Cybersecurity maturity assessments
Is your organization equipped to handle an attack? Performing a comprehensive cybersecurity maturity assessment can help evaluate your organization’s readiness and track progress over time.
Maturity assessments help address several key questions that every security leader must address when presenting to the board. Where should you focus areas of improvement? Are your security controls up-to-date and is compliance being met with annual audits? You can’t mitigate what you don’t know exists or has little to no impact on your business objectives.
Communication with the board
Research conducted by HBR found that 76% of board members believe they have made adequate investments in cyber protection. CRQ findings further support these investments and remove the unknown hypothesis on whether the budget is properly allocated to mitigate critical threats. The proof is in the planning.
A CRQ summary can help a CISO justify cybersecurity funding from C-level management since mitigating risks can be directly attributed to cost savings. It can also make briefing the board a more simplified process. Rather than relying on technical jargon and hypothetical presumptions, the CISO can present quantifiable data that clearly demonstrates the financial impact of potential cyber threats and the value of proposed mitigation strategies.
But threats evolve daily. An attacker’s entry path is more complex than you might imagine.
How can you trace their origin path if you don’t know which critical assets are at risk in the first place?
Take an Offensive Approach to Your Cybersecurity Strategy with CYE
Can you determine the likelihood of threats and the business assets that are most at risk?
We’ve collected insights from our team of experts at CYE and leveraged actual data so you can thwart an attacker’s path before they reach your business-critical assets.
In this guide, you’ll learn how you can outsmart hackers by:
- Visualizing probable attack routes using vulnerability data
- Prioritizing mitigation that strengthens security posture while minimizing costs
- Developing a strategy for thinking ahead of potential attackers
Learn how CYE makes it more difficult for attackers to breach your organization.
Grab your Guide to Outsmarting Hackers here.
