Cybersecurity risk assessments help organizations understand, control, and mitigate all forms of cyber risk. It is a critical component of risk management strategy and data protection efforts.
Risk assessments are nothing new and whether you like it or not, if you work in information security, you are in the risk management business. As organizations rely more on information technology and information systems to do business, the digital risk landscape expands, exposing ecosystems to new critical vulnerabilities.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a Cybersecurity Framework to provide a base for risk assessment practices.
What is Cybersecurity Risk?
Cybersecurity risk is the likelihood of suffering negative disruptions to
sensitive data, finances, or business operations online. Most commonly, cyber
risks are associated with events that could result in a data breach.
Cybersecurity risks are sometimes referred to as security threats. Here are the
examples of cyber risks include:
- Ransomware
- Data leaks
- Phishing
- Malware
- Insider threats
- Cyberattacks
Though commonly used interchangeably, cyber risks and vulnerabilities are not the same. A vulnerability is a weakness that results in unauthorized network access when exploited, and a Cybersecurity risk is the probability of a vulnerability being exploited.
What is a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?
Cybersecurity risk assessments are defined by
NIST as risk assessments are used to identify, estimate, and prioritize risk to
organizational operations, organizational assets, individuals, other
organizations, and the Nation, resulting from the operation and use of
information systems.
The primary purpose of a Cybersecurity risk assessment is to keep
stakeholders informed and support proper responses to identified risks. They
also provide an executive summary to help executives and directors make
informed decisions about security.
The information security risk assessment
process is concerned with answering the following questions:
- What are our organization's most important information technology assets?
- What data breach would have a major impact on our business whether from malware, cyber-attack or human error? Think customer information.
- Can all threat sources be identified?
- What is the level of the potential impact of each identified threat?
- What are the internal and external vulnerabilities?
- What is the impact if those vulnerabilities are exploited?
If you can answer those questions, you will be able to make a determination of what to protect. This means you can develop IT security controls and data security strategies for risk remediation.
How to Perform a Cyber Risk Assessment?
We'll start with a high-level overview and drill down into each step in the next sections. Before you start assessing and mitigating risks, you need to understand what data you have, what infrastructure you have, and the value of the data you are trying to protect.
You may want to start by auditing your
data to answer the following questions:
- What data do we collect?
- How and where are we storing this data?
- How do we protect and document the data?
- How long do we keep data?
- Who has access internally and externally to the data?
Free Cybersecurity Assessment with Health Check Features
Our cybersecurity assessment tool is designed for healthcare providers to perform a security risk assessment as required by the HIPAA Security Program and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework. You can fill our free cyber security risk assessment form online which will take only 3-5 minutes to complete.
After finishing the cyber security risk
assessment, you will get a customized report with a health score including an
action plan.