Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, and new ones emerge regularly. As new vulnerabilities, malware variants, and attack vectors emerge, so must our organizational planning, readiness, and responses.
We must take a proactive approach to staying ahead of potential attackers. We must identify and address our cybersecurity weaknesses before they can be exploited. A cybersecurity maturity assessment is essential for gauging your readiness to handle a cyberattack.
Cybersecurity maturity is a measure of the effectiveness of an organization’s readiness and capability to protect against cyberattacks, achieved through evaluating how your organization performs in areas such as
- Identification of systems, processes, and people
- Protection against cyberattacks
- Detection of cybersecurity events
- Responses to cybersecurity incidents
- Recovery from those incidents.
Cyber threats
Cyber threats are dynamic and multifaceted, ranging from malware attacks to sophisticated phishing attempts. Assessing cybersecurity maturity isn’t just about measuring how well an organization can fend off attacks—it’s about evaluating its overall preparedness to detect threats, defense capabilities to mitigate the impact of potential breaches, and resilience to respond to and recover from incidents.
Here are some examples of the cyber threats that organizations face:
- Ransomware: Ransomware is a form of malware that takes control of a victim’s sensitive data or device, holding it hostage and demanding a ransom payment to release it, with the threat of keeping it locked or causing further harm if the ransom is not paid.
- Supply chain: In recent years, significant (and very public) attacks, including the much-publicized SolarWinds hack, have shown how dangerous supply chain attacks can be.
- Multi-vector attacks: As the name suggests, a multi-vector attack combines various techniques and attack vectors into a single campaign. You can think of it as attacking from multiple directions. In doing so, very few organizations have the resources or focus to detect and contain each attack simultaneously. This increases the probability of success for the bad actor.
The threats mentioned above only scratch the surface of cyber risk. Businesses must evolve their security measures and strategies to defend against such threats, respond to cyberattacks, and recover from them. A cybersecurity maturity assessment helps them get a good perspective on their security posture.
What Is Involved in a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment?
A cybersecurity maturity assessment provides insight into your organization’s security posture.
A cybersecurity assessment systematically evaluates an organization’s digital infrastructure to identify potential exposures, assess associated risks, and determine the effectiveness of current security defenses against cyber threats. The outcome of cyber risk assessment is a snapshot of the overall security posture, highlighting weaknesses and prioritizing areas for improvement to enhance cyber resilience. Rather than being a one-time evaluation, it’s an ongoing, systematic process.
Key personnel
The key personnel involved in the maturity assessment process are:
- CISOs–assessing results, setting targets, tracking maturity progress, and reporting to management boards.
- Security personnel–adding data, monitoring, creating findings, and mitigation plans.
Protecting your organization from cybersecurity threats goes beyond a management concern; it should be embedded in everyday practices by all employees. CYE’s Hyver cybersecurity maturity assessment helps identify and measure the extent of your organization’s security gaps, enabling you to develop a strategy for creating a secure environment that can be measured and monitored.
Objectives of a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment
A maturity assessment measures and helps improve an organization’s security posture.
The maturity assessment enables you to do a comprehensive inspection of the cybersecurity elements that contribute to the security posture of your organization and provides insight into elements such as the following:
- Understanding and managing the cybersecurity risk to your organization’s systems, assets, data, and capabilities.
- The controls and processes that are in place to protect your organization from risk.
- The mechanisms that are in place to identify the occurrence of a cybersecurity event.
- Responses or playbooks for taking actions regarding a detected cybersecurity event.
- The recovery capabilities that are in place to recover from a cybersecurity event.
A risk assessment is not a cybersecurity maturity assessment.
A cyber risk assessment evaluates and measures specific risks to an organization’s IT infrastructure. It concentrates on identifying potential vulnerabilities, assessing the likelihood of an attack, and estimating possible damage.
A cybersecurity maturity assessment takes a more strategic approach. Instead of concentrating on specific threats, it evaluates an organization’s overall readiness and capacity to manage security over the long term, ensuring that cybersecurity practices are integrated at every level.
Key Components of a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment
The concept of assessment is typically linked to the ideas of appraisal, judgment, opinion, or calculating the value of something. In security maturity assessment, several options are available for appraising or judging the state of security in a particular area, such as asset management or regulatory compliance.
A framework such as NIST CSF 2.0 consists of security outcome-driven statements that provide considerations for creating or improving a cybersecurity program. In an assessment, you assign a maturity level to each of these outcomes. For example, the outcomes can include “Inventories of hardware managed by the organization are maintained,” “Data-at-rest is protected,” and “Notifications from detection systems are investigated.” The maturity levels you assign are based on the specific maturity assessment model.
Cybersecurity maturity assessment model
Cybersecurity maturity assessment models help companies understand their maturity level. They inform organizations about improvement by asking questions and developing action plans.
A cybersecurity maturity assessment model is a structured framework to assess an organization’s cyber posture management processes, practices, and controls. It offers various criteria for CISOs to evaluate how well the company is prepared to identify, detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity threats and incidents.
Organizations can choose from various cybersecurity maturity models. The NIST CSF and CIS are commonly used models.
NIST CSF
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a non-regulatory agency that promotes innovation by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology.
In an assessment, you measure your company’s performance against cybersecurity best practices and recommendations from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Overview of the Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Process
How maturity assessments are conducted will vary, depending on the organization. There are various cybersecurity maturity models to choose from, and multiple methods can be employed. For example, CYE’s maturity assessment in the Hyver platform uses its maturity assessment model in conjunction with NIST CSF. Assessors select a maturity level on the maturity rating scale in Hyver and apply the rating to each NIST CSF security outcome (subcategory). Essentially, this rating scale goes from the lowest maturity level of one to the highest maturity level of five.
Assessment process overview
- Establish goals and scope of the maturity assessment. Determine which aspects of security maturity or cyber maturity you want to cover. These are likely to be defined in the selected framework.
- Identify the stakeholders involved, such as IT teams, security specialists, regulatory and compliance specialists, and others relevant to the cybersecurity maturity assessment process.
- Cybersecurity assessors gather information about an organization’s current cybersecurity technologies, processes, and people by interviewing relevant personnel to gain in-depth knowledge needed for the assessment.
- Apply a maturity level rating from the maturity scale to every security outcome defined by the framework or standard. For example, with NIST, there are over 100 security outcomes that you can assess. An example of an outcome you apply a maturity level rating to is “Inventories of hardware managed by the organization are maintained.”
- Assess overall maturity. When the maturity rating is complete, assessors can identify areas of weakness that might need immediate attention, but several actions can be taken.
- Set target maturity levels.
- Prioritize risk and plan mitigation activities.
- CISOs can use security maturity assessment data to support budget requests.
- Based on the assessment findings, create an improvement plan. This plan could include implementing new technologies, enhancing security policies, providing employee training, or refining incident response plans.
- Ongoing Monitoring and Improvement. You must continually monitor and invest in cybersecurity by conducting periodic assessments and making necessary adjustments to adapt to new threats and challenges. It’s an ongoing process!
Are You Prepared?
Today, cyberattacks are not about occasional intrusions; they pose an existential threat to businesses of all sizes and sectors. The stakes have never been higher, from ransomware paralyzing critical infrastructures to data breaches compromising sensitive information.
A cybersecurity maturity assessment can be a shield, empowering you to understand, prepare for, and fortify your defenses against these sophisticated threats. As technology advances, so do cyber threats and the relevance of a cybersecurity maturity assessment.
Cybersecurity maturity assessments serve as a compass that guides your organization through an intricate maze of threats – empowering you to adapt, evolve, and thrive despite growing risks.
At CYE, we believe investing in cybersecurity maturity is one of an organization’s best ROI (returns on investments). Our Hyver platform’s maturity module measures your organization’s cybersecurity maturity, allowing you to set targets, benchmark against your industry, and track your progress over time while communicating with stakeholders to justify your budget. It relies on CYE’s objective and continuous data as well as your security team’s input. Hyver also incorporates maturity in its cost-of-breach calculations to ensure accuracy.
If you want to learn more, please book a demo.
