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First Steps – Prioritizing Key Cybersecurity Risks

A cybersecurity risk assessment is the single best place to start your company’s journey to cybersecurity maturity. But why can’t experts just tell you where to focus your cybersecurity investments? The answer is that without a risk assessment, they simply don’t have enough data to give you anything other than a pro forma answer. In fact, it's good advice to be wary of any cybersecurity provider who tells you their solution is the best investment for you without sitting down and asking a lot of questions.

Build a Fence or Buy a Fire Alarm?

Just imagine: there is a world of threats outside your home. But you can’t decide whether to build a fence, buy a surveillance system, invest in a fire alarm system, or maybe even look at a flood detection solution. None of these are bad ideas, but you can’t afford them all. The best way to decide what to do is to understand the comparative risks (likelihood and impact). Is your house on a floodplain? How far are you from a fire station? Do you live in a neighbourhood with a high rate of B&Es? If you want to protect yourself and have a limited budget, prioritize protecting yourself against the most likely and most high-impact threats. Once you’re secure against the worst threats, you can work on the less likely and less impactful ones.

Cybersecurity Risk Assessment

A cybersecurity risk assessment catalogs infrastructure or information that could be at risk from a cyberattack. You need to assess multiple threat vectors for each asset, including ransomware, data exfiltration, phishing, DDoS, malware –the list goes on. Then those areas of risk are evaluated for likelihood and the impact that various types and severities of cyber incident might have.

Step-by-Step Risk Analysis

Determining Asset Value

You need to know what you have and what it’s worth before you can make a plan to protect your assets.

  • List your assets
  • Assign value in terms of criticality to operations and value to competitors

Calculating Risks

You need to understand which assets represent the highest risk of being targeted.

  • What is the likelihood this asset will be compromised, stolen, or destroyed?
  • How difficult would it be to compromise this asset or infiltrate the network through this asset?

Defining the Impacts

You need to evaluate what the impacts of a successful cyberattack could be. Those impacts will vary depending on the type of attack and the asset compromised.

  • Impacts on loss of productivity
  • Short and long-term impacts due to loss of data
  • Impacts on partners and customers
  • Consequences in terms of compliance and regulatory issues
  • Financial impacts due to the cost of remediation

Cost of Securing Assets

The next factor in your assessment is to understand the cost of securing a specific asset.

  • What do you need to do to secure an asset?
  • How much would it cost?
  • How much will that protection reduce the risk?

Evaluating the Cost / Benefit and Prioritizing

To finalize the process, you’ll need to compare risk, impacts, and costs to develop a prioritized set of recommendations.

  • What are our highest risk / highest impact assets?
  • What is the cost of securing those assets?
  • How much protection can you afford?

Always Start with a Risk Assessment

If your organization is just getting started with cybersecurity, a risk assessment is the best place to start. The risk assessment will give you the baseline data you need to start building an effective cybersecurity strategy. Suppose you already have some cybersecurity measures in place but are concerned about whether or not you have the proper protection in place. In that case, a risk assessment will help you understand where your strengths and weaknesses are. In short, if you are thinking in terms of cybersecurity strategy and prioritization at any stage in the development of your cybersecurity program, a risk assessment is always a good place to start so that you can make decisions based on actual, current data.

Need Help? StreamScan is Here.

Whether you need help conducting a risk assessment, developing a security plan, or implementing a Managed Detection and Response solution, StreamScan has experts with many years of experience who can help. Get in touch with us at smbsecurity@streamscan.ai or call us at 1 877-208-9040.