As unanticipated risks, vulnerabilities, and failures increase in the hyper-convergence world, a solid cyber-resilience strategy is considered the best first line of defense for companies. A cyber resilience strategy can assist your company in reducing risks, financial impact, and brand harm.
Cyber security gap analysis is a crucial step you need to put in place to succeed in the fight against cyber threats. In this blog, we’ll run you through on how a detailed cyber security risk assessment report is created.
Let’s begin.
What is cyber risk?
The chance of sensitive data, finances or business operations being disrupted online is known as cyber risk. Cyber risks are usually connected with situations that potentially result in a data breach.
Here are a few examples of cyber risks:
- Phishing
- Malware
- Ransomware
- Cyber Attacks
- Insider Threats
- Data Leaks
Cyber risks can be classified into four levels: Zero, Low, Medium, and High.
By gauging what the threat is, how vulnerable is the system, and the financial value if breached, cyber security analysis experts use a simple formula to assess the risk:
Cyber risk = Threat x Vulnerability x Information Value
How to perform cyber risk assessment
Traditionally, cyber risk assessments are performed by in-house IT teams with a sound knowledge of how the network infrastructure and information flows work. However, small businesses that do not have the right resources can outsource the assessment to a third-party specialist. However, it is important for enterprises to know about the cyber risk analysis process.
Performing Cyber risk assessment
Step 1: Determining asset value
Spend some time creating a standard for determining the value of your asset. You can include legal standing and business importance. Once the standard is officially incorporated into the company’s information risk management policy, use it to classify each asset as a) Critical, b) Major, or c) Minor.
If you have limited budgets for information risk management, it’s best to focus on the most crucial assets.
Step 2: Identity and prioritize assets
Now, identify assets to estimate and determine the scope of the assessment. It may not be necessary to assess every employee, data, trade secret, building, vehicle, and equipment because not all assets have the same value.
The best way is to work with business users and management to create a list of all valuable assets. Gather the following information for each asset, if applicable:
Software, Hardware, Data, Interface, End-users, Purpose, Criticality, Functional requirements, Network topology and Information flow.
Step 3: Identifying cyber threats and their impact
Identify every possible threat that could put your business at risk, such as malware, ransomware, system failures, human error, data leaks, natural disasters, etc. Then assess the impact of each threat.
Step 4: Analyze and implement new security controls
Once you identify your threats and their impact, you have to implement appropriate controls. It could be technical controls like encryption, software and hardware protection, antivirus, automatic updates, multi-factor authentication, and data leak detection. Or it could involve physical security controls such as locks and keyboard access mechanisms.
Step 5: Create a risk frequency report
Now, you enter the middle section of cyber risk analysis. The next step is to sketch a report that determines how likely these cyber hazards are to materialise and what impact they will have if they do. It’s not only a question of if you’ll encounter one of these occurrences at some point; it’s also a question of what impact it could have on your business.
You may then use these inputs to figure out how much to spend to mitigate each of the cyber threats you’ve identified.
Step 6: Evaluate between cost of prevention Vs value of the asset
After creating a risk frequency report, it’s time to determine the value of your assets and how much you are willing to spend on each asset to protect it. It may not make sense to utilise preventative control to protect an asset if it costs more to protect it than it is worth.
Step 7: Creating the cyber risk assessment report
The last step is to create a risk assessment report that will aid management in making a budget, policy, and procedural decision. The report should detail the threat’s risk, vulnerabilities, and value. Also included are the consequences, the chance of occurrence, and control measures.
Endnote
Cyber security analysis report is a crucial part of cyber security. With a solid risk assessment report in place, a well-rounded security foundation can be established to identify vulnerabilities and thwart threats effectively.
Netlabs is one of the leaders in providing state-of-the-art Cyber Security & Compliance services to help enterprises defend against cyber risks and position with a high-level preparedness against looming threats. Talk to us today to learn more about how our solutions can help your business.
