Today’s threat environment is complex and leaves organizations like yours facing the risk of a cyber attack. Performing a risk assessment is a common practice organizations undertake to protect their digital assets against the ever-growing number of cyber attacks and data breaches. A cyber risk assessment helps you understand, control, and mitigate all forms of cyber risk, as well as identify gaps in your cyber security program so you can improve their security posture.
What is cyber risk?
Cyber risk is the probability of exposure or potential loss resulting from a cyber attack or data breach. The impact from a cyber attack could include damage and destruction of data, monetary loss, theft of intellectual data, productivity loss and reputational damage. There are many examples of cyber risks, some of which include:
- Ransomware
- Spam and phishing
- Malware
- Insider threats
- Cyber attacks
- Data leaks
What is a cyber risk assessment?
A cyber risk assessment is the process of identifying, analyzing, and evaluating cyber risks and providing valuable information about these risks so you can better protect your organization against cyber attacks. An assessment helps determine any risks that exist across your organization’s networks, devices, applications, and users, and rates how big a risk any issues in these areas are. A cyber risk assessment also records what your organization is doing to mitigate the identified issues and what still needs to be done to further mitigate those issues.
Essentially, a cyber risk assessment is the process of building a complete picture of your attack surface by discovering and cataloging your assets, identifying cyber threats that could affect those assets, and then calculating the likelihood of those threats occurring and the impact they may have.
A cyber risk assessment allows you to answer the following questions:
- What are my most critical assets?
- How vulnerable are my critical assets to potential breaches and attacks?
- Which vulnerabilities are posing the most risk to my internally- and externally-facing assets?
- What is the impact if those vulnerabilities are exploited?
- What is the risk posture of our organization?
- How comprehensive and effective is our overall cyber security program?
- Do we have real-time visibility into our entire threat environment?
- What is the likelihood and impact of each identified threat?
- What is the measure of our cyber risk in quantifiable terms?
Why perform a cyber risk assessment?
With vulnerabilities and threats emerging at a very rapid rate, a cyber risk assessment is an important tool for any organization looking to stay protected. An assessment can greatly help you improve your ability to detect and contain attacks and recover from security events. For instance, with a cyber risk assessment, you gain visibility into your asset inventory, vulnerabilities and overall attack surface, and document the controls and processes you have in place. You also calculate the likelihood of an attack occurring and the impact it might have on your business. All of these insights are valuable to help your organization properly manage and respond to risks. An assessment can also help you meet regulatory compliance standards.
Who should perform a cyber risk assessment?
Cyber risk assessments are essential to any cyber security program. Ideally you should perform them on a continuous basis. No matter how many controls you have in place, you can never fully protect your growing attack surface. But, you can reduce your risk. A cyber risk assessment provides your security team with the key insights they need to take a more proactive approach to mitigating risk.
What cyber risk assessment frameworks are available?
There are a number of cyber risk assessment frameworks available. One of the most popular frameworks is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, which provides a structured approach to assessing and mitigating cyber risk. You can also develop your own risk assessment framework with the goal of more effectively identifying and properly responding to risks.
How to perform a cyber risk assessment
Assessing an organization’s cybersecurity posture is complex. Understanding and defining the full scope of your cyber security posture is essential to a risk assessment. A risk assessment typically involves three steps.
Inventorying assets and determining their importance
When performing a cyber risk assessment, you should start by obtaining a big-picture view of your enterprise in terms of all the assets – devices, users, and applications – connected to your environment. Once you have visibility into which assets are part of your network, you should catalog the details of your assets. For example, you should identify which these assets are highly critical for your business and which ones are less important, how likely each asset is to be compromised, and how successful attacks might impact your business.
An automated asset discovery tool can help you to discover and inventory all of your assets, and allow your organization to continuously maintain an up-to-date asset inventory. Some of these tools, like cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) solutions, also determine which assets are most likely to be exploited and how critical they are.
Identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities
The next step in the cyber risk assessment process is to identify vulnerabilities that exist across your network, prioritize them and determine what controls are in place to mitigate these issues. In this step, you assess your ability to protect your organization from cyber threats and identify areas for improvement in your cyber security program.
Taking a risk-based approach to vulnerability management at this stage could help your organization. It can be difficult to identify vulnerabilities due to there being numerous attack vectors, and to prioritize them. Risk-based vulnerability management helps you to understand the context around each vulnerability and the underlying asset it affects. Armed with this information, you are able to determine how vulnerable you are to potential breaches and cyber attacks and start initiatives to tackle vulnerabilities in the most efficient manner.
Calculating cyber risk as a combination of likelihood and impact
The last step in the cyber risk assessment process is to translate the likelihood of a cyber attack occurring and its potential impact into quantified risk. If you assess your risk through a monetary lens you can communicate risk to key stakeholders, like your CFO and the board, in terms they easily understand. In addition, calculating risk in dollars (or another local currency) helps security teams make informed decisions about how to allocate resources and mitigate risk based on financial impact.
An automated approach to cyber risk quantification, uses machine learning and AI to continuously analyze operational data in order to quantify cyber risk. The key benefit to using automation is that your risk calculation will change in real-time as new threats and vulnerabilities emerge, as security threats are mitigated, or as other changes happen in your environment. As a result, your organization’s risk calculation stays accurate and up-to-date, allowing for better decision-making.
While cyber risk assessments can be time-consuming and complex, there are solutions that make the process easier. For example, an automated cybersecurity software continuously inventories assets, discovers and prioritizes vulnerabilities and calculates breach likelihood and impact in real-time. All of this information will help your organization become more familiar with the risks facing its network and build effective risk mitigation strategies.
Cyber risk assessment with Balbix
Balbix automates the cyber risk assessment process every step of the way. Balbix’s automatic asset inventory solution automatically supplies you with a unified and real-time view of all your assets, on-premises and in the cloud.
To identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, Balbix’s risk-based vulnerability management solution automatically ingests vulnerability data, fills in data gaps, adds business context and uses advanced analytics to calculate your overall risk based on breach likelihood.
With Balbix’s cyber risk quantification solution, you can unify all of your cyber security data into a single comprehensive cyber risk quantification model. In doing so, you can provide everyone – from security analysts to the board – with a continuous and real-time view of cyber risk in dollars. Additionally, Balbix traces risk issues to the underlying vulnerabilities and assets, and provides you with clear guidance and actionable steps to address those vulnerabilities.
