According to a report by an Information Technology (IT) research and consultancy company, Gartner, the seven top trends in cybersecurity for 2022 included: attack surface expansion, identity system defense, digital supply chain risk, vendor consolidation, cybersecurity mesh, distributed decisions and beyond awareness.
“Threat actors never rest, and neither should you,” says a statement by a company that offers modern risk management technology empowering businesses to proactively transform risk enterprise-wide, LogicGate as it outlined four steps for making sure one is paying the right amount of attention to the right cyber risks
1.Identify your cyber risks
Cybersecurity risk management frameworks, like SOC2, NIST, or ISO 27005 will help a firm identify the type of threat they are facing. These frameworks are proven sets of standards, policies, and procedures for protecting your company’s systems and data from cybersecurity threats.
These include methods of identifying the existing organization’s vulnerabilities, enabling officials to start evaluating which needs the most attention.
The frameworks help a firm to, “Quickly and easily prove to current or prospective customers, your board and cyber insurers that you’re taking adequate steps to protect your information. This can be a competitive differentiator and a money-saver.”
2. Quantify and rank your risks
Once a firm has a clear understanding of the nature of cyber risk, officials can start tying risks to impact to determine which poses the most serious threats.
These risks will be assessed based on their: likelihood to occur, potential impact and risk velocity to enable identify which risks warrant the most attention.
3.Use advanced prioritization methods
Handling the most important risks first requires an even deeper level of analysis for instance; the risk quantification method, which allows you to attribute financial or other business impacts to the risks that fall into the more severe categories from your last analysis.
Methods like Monte Carlo simulation (a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results) or the Open FAIR™ model (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) work well for this purpose.
“Being able to pin a monetary value to your risks will allow you to take that information to leadership and more easily secure buy-in for doing what is necessary to address or respond to them.”
4.Implement a risk-based mitigation strategy
According to LogicGate, you will need to decide what sort of treatment each of the risks requires:
Acceptance: If your evaluations indicate that a certain risk is unlikely to have a significant negative impact on your company, you can just accept it. This is most likely not a solution, though, for your most significant cybersecurity risks.
Avoidance: This tactic simply entails refraining from actions that might subject you to a certain risk. You can completely avoid the risk if you’ve established that it could have an unacceptably large impact on your company and you’re willing to endure the potential opportunity cost of forgoing the related activity.
Transfer: Making a third party, such as insurance, responsible for your risk is a compromise between acceptance and avoidance. This enables you to carry on participating in and benefiting from the activity that exposes.