In the current digital age business owners, no matter how big, are faced with constant cybersecurity threats. Conducting a thorough cybersecurity risk assessment is an essential step towards knowing what your business needs to safeguard, what threats are posed to it and the best way to prioritize actions to minimize the risk. In this blog we’ll explain the reasons why the cybersecurity risk assessment is essential, what it is, and give the most thorough step-by-step procedure for conducting onealong with the best practices to follow and mistakes to avoid.
Why Conduct a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?
An assessment of cybersecurity risks will help you answer the most important questions like:
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What are my key assets (data applications, systems and people)?
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What weaknesses do we have and what are the threats that could attack these weaknesses?
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What are the consequences of a mistake (financial loss or reputational damage, penalties)?
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What risks are acceptable, and which ones require treatment (mitigation or transfer or acceptance)?
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How can we allocate our scarce resources to the most important priority?
According to Cybersecurity and the Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) risk assessments aid organizations “understand the cyber-related risks for their operations … as well as improve the cyber resilience of their operations and operation.”
Additionally, IBM notes that a cyber risk assessment is “a systematic procedure that determines and analyzes the potential cyber-related risks that exist within an organization’s networks devices, applications, and even users.” IBM
If you don’t evaluate risks, you’re ignoring in terms of security planning and investment.
What the Assessment Should Cover
Before you get into the process before you begin, here are the essential components that your analysis must include:
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Scope and boundaries What percentage of the company is covered (entire company, division or critical system etc. )?
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Asset inventory and classification What assets are in existence (hardware software process, data and people) and how crucial are they?
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Vulnerabilities and threats What could happen (threats) and what are the weak points (vulnerabilities)?
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Analyzing risk What is the chance of a malicious actor exploiting an vulnerability? What impact will it have of it if it happens?
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Prioritisation of risks: Which risks have the most important based on their probability and impact? Which ones should be tackled first?
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Risk treatment/controls What control (technical or procedural) do you intend to apply? Are you able to minimize, avoid the risk, transfer or accept every risk?
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Monitoring and documentation Document your observations (risk register) monitor efforts to mitigate them, and regularly examine and update your assessment as circumstances alter.
Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting the Assessment
Here’s a useful guideline which you could follow
1. Determine the Scope
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Decide the areas your risk assessment will include: the entire company or a particular business unit, a specific system or procedures.
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Find the stakeholders: executives business unit heads IT/security, legal/compliance. It is crucial to get their support.
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Document assumptions as well as constraints and legal/regulatory requirements. For instance: “This assessment covers all systems that store customer information inside the U.S.”
2. Identify & Prioritise Assets
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Create an inventory of your assets: hardware (servers, endpoints), software/applications, data stores, network infrastructure, people, processes.
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For each asset, categorize its importance or significance (e.g., “High” for customer information, “Medium” for internal Wiki).
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Be aware of dependencies. For instance the business unit might depend on a cloud shared provider or service.
3. Identify Threats and Vulnerabilities
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Threats What could be wrong? Internal hackers and external hacker mishaps and malware, phishing natural disasters, supply chain issues.
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Security vulnerabilities weaknesses in your processes, systems or in your employees. Insecure systems, unpatched access controls and passwords that are weak and lack of education.
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Use threat libraries and frameworks (e.g., MITRE Corporation ATT&CK, National Vulnerability Database) to aid in identifying security threats.
4. Risk Analysis (Likelihood x Impact)
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For every risk scenario (a threat that exploits an vulnerability in an asset) be sure to evaluate:
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Probability What is the likelihood of the possibility that this scenario will occur? Consider exploitability, discoverability, reproducibility.
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Impact In the event that it occurs what are the consequences for the company (financial loss, interruption to business, reputational damage or fines)?
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You can use qualitative (high/medium/low) or quantitative (dollar cost, uptime hours lost) methods.
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The results can be mapped in the form of a Risk matrix (e.g. Table of likelihood vs. impact) to visualize which risks are the most risky.
5. Risk Prioritisation & Treatment
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With your Risk Matrix, determine the risks that exceed your organization’s tolerance or risk appetite. The ones that exceed it are those that you need to address first.
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For each risk that is high-priority choose the appropriate strategy for treatment:
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Avoid Avoiding the risk: Stop the action that causes the risk.
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Reduce Controls to minimize the impact or likelihood (patching control of access, training).
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Transfer Risk shift through outsourcing, insurance, or contract protections.
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Accept Accept if the cost of mitigation isn’t justifiable and the risk is within acceptable limits.
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Write down the timelines, responsibilities and other resources for each mitigation step.
6. Implement Controls & Monitor
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Set the selected controls into operation Put the chosen controls into action: technical (firewalls encryption, firewalls patches management) and procedural (policies and incident response plans) and personnel (training and awareness).
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Monitor progress: Are the controls effective? Are the risk levels declining? Are new vulnerabilities emerging?
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Assessment should be an ongoing process, not an event that happens once. Keep track of your inventory of assets and risk list, as well as the threat matrix when technology and business changes.
7. Document & Communicate
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Create an Register of risks (list of the risks, their likelihood, impacts and controls, as well as the status).
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Prepare a summative report for the leader: emphasize important risks, what’s being done to mitigate them, and the requirements for resources and timelines.
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Make sure that the all stakeholders in the business understand the risks and provide assistance is required.
Best Practices & Tips
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Engage multi-functional stakeholders Security isn’t just an IT issue. Operations, business units as well as HR and legal/compliance should all be involved.
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Utilize a recognized framework like NIST’s Special Publication 800-30 (R1) (Risk Assessment Guide)
or or NIST Cybersecurity Framework Core functions (Identify and Protect, Detect and Recover, Respond,). Wikipedia
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Make sure you keep your inventory of assets current. What’s not recorded can’t be secured.
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Be focused on the impact on business and not only technical impact. A vulnerability in a system with a low impact might not be as critical as one that affects revenue-generating systems.
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Be realistic about risk and impact. Stay clear of “all risks are very high” statements.
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Take your findings useful control with the owners deadlines, budgets, deadlines.
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Review the report regularly and make adjustments the assessment as your company or threat landscape changes.
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Document assumptions and ensure openness in the way risk levels were formulated.
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Be aware of the risks of third party vendors Most security breaches are caused by suppliers.
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Mix quantitative and qualitative methods whenever possible However, you must tailor the method to the size of your business and resources.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
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The scope creep Beware that trying to cover all aspects at once could overwhelm resources. It is better to begin with a smaller scope and then expand.
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Incomplete inventory of assets Devices that are not present cloud services, IoT-related endpoints or shadow IT affect the assessment.
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Concentrating on only technical controls Process and people risk (e.g. Phishing or incorrect configuration) frequently cause breaches.
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Assuming that risk is not static The threat landscape changes as new systems are introduced and risk needs to be assessed.
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Insufficient business context Technical issue that doesn’t have a the business’s impact could be ignored.
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Insufficient stakeholder participation In the absence of the support of leaders, reforms could slow down.
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Insufficient documentation If you’re unable to demonstrate what was assessed in terms of likelihood/impact, how it was assessed and what’s being accomplished, you’ll be unable to monitor progress or justify your decisions.
Conclusion
The cybersecurity risk analysis isn’t just a one-time event. It’s a strategy which helps you comprehend your risk landscape, prioritise your actions and make the most efficient use of resources. If you follow the above steps -the process of scoping, inventory of assets assessment, identification of threats and vulnerabilities assessment, risk analysis prioritisation, control deployment and monitoring you’ll be better prepared to safeguard your company’s most valuable assets and to respond to the constantly evolving threat landscape.
