How Do You Conduct a Cybersecurity Assessment?
The best way to protect your business against cyber attacks and the recovery periods after one occurs is to perform a risk assessment of your cybersecurity. Not only will it ensure that your business services continue to run smoothly, but it will also make it easier to pass cyber insurance assessments. Cyber insurance assessments are completed by insurance companies to check a business’ cybersecurity before approving them for cyber insurance, which is vital for businesses to have to recuperate after a cyber attack.
Before conducting a risk assessment of your own, it’s important to first understand the different kinds of risk your digital environment is susceptible to.
What Are the Five Main Types of Risk in Cybersecurity?
There are five main types of risk in cybersecurity that can affect businesses of any industry. They are:
Spam and Phishing: These are among the most common and basic types of risk. Spam refers to any unwanted emails or messages received. Phishing refers to a cyber criminal attempting to gather sensitive information from people via messages or emails by pretending to be a person or business that the target knows.
Malware: This threat is a program inserted into an application or system to interfere with, damage, or access data.
Ransomware: This is a type of malware that prevents or limits your personnel’s access to systems or files until you pay the criminal to unlock them. Criminals may not unlock anything even after payment, or they may cause damage before unlocking them.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Cyberattackers inundate websites with lots of traffic to slow the website down and to disrupt the online services offered on them.
Corporate Account Takeover (CATO): Cyber criminals pretend to be part of your business and send money to their accounts.
If you are part of a financial institution, you may also fall victim to a sixth risk, which is an ATM cash out. Criminals will take out large amounts of cash via withdrawals simultaneously at different locations, or they will make several transactions at a single ATM.
Conducting a cybersecurity assessment can show you weaknesses in your systems, applications, or website so that you can prevent many of these risks from occurring.
What Is a Cybersecurity Assessment?
A cybersecurity assessment, also called a security risk assessment, involves:
Analyzing computer systems, applications, webpages, etc. to check for cyber attacks or the potential of one
Determining how much damage the attack might cause
Recommending next steps to take to prevent the attack from happening
The Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) recommends that your business conduct these assessments at least once every two years. However, you should try to conduct these assessments more regularly if possible because each assessment only captures risk at one point in time. Organizations at especially high risk should try to do these assessments continuously to better protect their data and daily business operations.
How to Conduct a Security Risk Assessment
To assess the potential risks of your digital environments, use this cybersecurity risk assessment checklist:
Check local and industry-related guidelines and requirements to make sure that all parts of your IT environment and related security measures are compliant. Take a look at your own policies and procedures as well to make sure everything matches what is necessary to keep your data safe. This is a good time to also review how often and how in-depth cybersecurity training with employees goes and to make changes as needed.
Conduct risk identification in cybersecurity. Rather than identifying risks that have already occurred, you determine which groups or individuals pose a threat to your business’ cybersecurity as well as what events might make your business more vulnerable to an attack. An example of an event includes attempted phishing attacks. You should also identify weak points in your digital systems that also might be easier to breach.
Determine the likelihood of a cyber attack and the severity of the impact it will have on your business. You may base these probabilities on analysis on both digital environments as well as assessment of physical IT environments. Figuring out how hard it is to gain access to your systems or go through the authentication process can also aid you in determining the probabilities of attack.
Calculate risk. You do this by combining the probabilities of a cyber attack occurring and how damaging it would be if it did occur. Damages include unplanned downtimes, lost revenue, and even customer churn in some cases.
Create a cybersecurity risk assessment report. This details everything you gathered during the risk assessment process and provides recommendations on what next steps to take so that your business’ leadership team can make a decision based upon your findings.
For more guidance on how to conduct one of these risk assessments, refer to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines.
Prepare for Cyber Insurance Assessments With Moser
Cyber criminals are crafty. That’s why no matter how often you run a security risk assessment, you may still fall victim to an attack. Having cyber insurance helps businesses recover from one of these attacks quicker, but getting good coverage, if any at all, is difficult if businesses don’t perform well during the cyber insurance assessment. Moser Consulting can help prepare you for these assessments.
We offer a cyber insurance readiness review to make sure you meet all of your potential insurer’s policy requirements as well as provide you with some guidance on how much coverage you need and what limits you should accept. If you already have cyber insurance, we will also review your current policy to see whether it is a right fit for your needs. If you would like assistance with getting cyber insurance, contact us today.
