In 2023, 60% of incidents investigated by Arctic Wolf® Incident Response involved the exploitation of a two- (or more) year-old vulnerability. These vulnerabilities were well known, and the affected organizations had anywhere from months to years to patch them prior to an incident occurring. This statistic highlights how, while there are a multitude of factors affecting how an organization mitigates risk and hardens their attack surface, a major one is the continuing lack of visibility into their own environment, alongside an inability to stay updated with patches due to a lack of resources, an unwillingness to take systems offline, and other factors.
This is where cyber risk assessments come into play. Made to help organizations identify, assess, and reduce risk across their attack surface by ensuring policies that address items such as vulnerability scanning, patch management, and adherence to security standards, these assessments can empower businesses to alleviate known threats (like vulnerabilities) before they turn into security incidents.
What is Cyber Risk?
Cyber risk is any potential loss of data, confidentially, or control for an organization due to a cyber incident. Cyber risk can often be in flux, and is determined by both external factors, such as threat actor trends and attack types (e.g., ransomware, encryption, or data exfiltration attacks), and internal factors, such as the cybersecurity practices an organization has in place (e.g., policies implemented, a firewall, or 24×7 monitoring platform).
Cyber risk can best be understood as a degree of probability, calculated by the factors listed above. Cyber risk increases the probability of your organization falling victim to a cyber threat such as:
- Phishing
- Malware
- Ransomware
- Insider threats
- And, many more
Because cyber risk can often be in flux, every organization needs to assess their own risk and take the necessary steps to address it programmatically.
What is a Cyber Risk Assessment?
A cyber risk assessment is a comprehensive assessment that considers and evaluates your processes, your people, and your technology with the end goal of understanding your organization’s overall cyber risk level based, primarily, on likelihood and impact of a cyber incident.
Cyber risk assessments are built upon three main actions: assess, prioritize, and communicate. This means it should assess your processes, technology, and people in relation to cybersecurity and cyber risk; prioritize how that risk can be reduced; and communicates those assessments and recommendations to relevant stakeholders, including compliance regulators and cyber insurance providers . These assessments can be conducted internally or with the assistance of a third-party provider.
Steps For Conducting a Cyber Risk Assessment
A cyber risk assessment should be a thorough process that involves multiple stakeholders. Additionally, because risk is fluid, as is an organization’s security posture, these assessments are not a “one-and-done” situation. They need to be conducted in a regular cadence, with the end goal of continually hardening your organization’s attack surface as your operations grow.
While the specifics will vary by an organization’s profile, including its industry, maturity level, and size, as well as the current threat landscape, there are a few steps every organization conducting a cyber risk assessment should include:
1. Set parameters and goals for the assessment. It’s critical for an organization to know what parts of their IT environment they’re going to assess and what they’re measuring against. Understanding what will be measured, how it will be measured, and what the end goal is for the data collected will help an organization not only interpret the assessment correctly, but set themselves up for success at the end, when it comes time to harden their attack surface and reduce risk.
2. Choose a framework to measure your assessment against. There are a few industry-standard cybersecurity frameworks available to help your organization interpret its internal risk. The NIST CSF 2.0 integrates industry-leading cybersecurity practices into a single, simplified framework, while the CIS Critical Security Controls offer overarching cybersecurity measures organizations can follow and implement. Globally, the Essential Eight in Australia, and NIS2 in European Union offer robust guidance.
By comparing the results of your internal assessment against these frameworks, your organization can better identify key risk factors, weaknesses, and action items.
3. Inventory all assets. Visibility is not only crucial to a cyber risk assessment, but also a core component of strong cybersecurity. You can’t protect what you can’t see, so taking inventory of your critical assets, applications, identities and access points, and endpoints will allow your organization to map out where risk exists and where it could spread if an incident occurs. This visibility will not only allow your organization to pinpoint weaknesses across the attack surface but will allow for more comprehensive coverage as new cybersecurity tools and processes are put in place.
4. Identify threats, vulnerabilities, and points of risk. This step can be extensive, and it’s important to remember that threats, vulnerabilities, and points of risk don’t exist in just one part of the attack surface. Vulnerabilities can exploit web-based applications, parts of the cloud, IoT devices, and more. Threats are multi-faceted and can target various components of the environment as well. Points of risk need to include everything from those vulnerabilities to your identity and access management structure to even how your cybersecurity tools are set up and how your cloud is configured. Being thorough in this process will help your organization better prioritize risks as well as what actions need to be taken, and when.
5. Document results and prioritize risks discovered based on business and security goals. After your organization has identified security gaps and risk points, now is the time to document said results and meet with key stakeholders and determine the next steps for risk reduction. That can be done in a variety of ways, from implementing new solutions to patching vulnerabilities to working to transfer risk through cyber insurance.
Post Assessment: analyze and implement new cybersecurity controls. This is the action portion of the assessment, where your organization takes the data collected and makes concrete steps based on the results. As we discussed, not every control needs to be implemented at once. How, when, and why an organization reduces risk is based on a number of factors, including business and security goals, resource and financial availability, and the amount of risk an organization is willing to accept.
Common controls implemented based on cyber risk assessments include:
- The patching of vulnerabilities
- The implementation of new identity and access management procedures
- Software updates and new security measures on endpoints
- The installation of monitoring, detection, and response solutions
- The use of security training programs to reduce human risk
The Benefits of Conducting a Cyber Risk Assessment
Security is a journey, not a destination, and cyber risk assessments can serve as a valuable stop toward robust cybersecurity. They allow you to absorb and act on critical risk information that will improve your cyber risk, your business initiatives and resilience, and your cyber insurance.
Conducting a cyber risk assessment comes with multiple benefits. Those benefits include:
- The identification of internal security gaps, such as vulnerabilities, poor access controls, poor identity management, and weaknesses across endpoints and other devices
- The ability to establish and maintain a cyber risk baseline
- Documentation needed to communicate risk to non-technical stakeholders
- Development of governance capabilities to help your organization reduce cyber risk
- Creating security posture improvement initiatives and processes
- Improving cyber insurability , allowing your organization to transfer risk
A major determining factor in obtaining cyber insurance is your organization’s overall risk level. Your organization not only needs to reduce that risk but also needs to communicate to cyber insurance brokers and underwriters both your risk levels and the cybersecurity processes in place to continually reduce that risk. It’s also important that organizations look inwards and determine their own risk tolerance and the amount, and kind, of risk they’re willing to accept.
The Arctic Wolf Cyber Resilience Assessment
Conducting a cyber risk assessment internally can be difficult for organizations to achieve, especially smaller, less security- mature organizations. They take resources, time, and budget, three things many organizations don’t have enough of.
The Arctic Wolf Cyber Resilience Assessment allows organizations to simply score, understand and reduce their cyber risk all in one dashboard. The assessment offers a transparent scoring index, insurability rating, easy-to-digest results, and more, allowing your organization to make clear decisions to increase your security posture. This assessment is part of Arctic Wolf Cyber JumpStart, a complimentary suite of tools, including the cyber resilience assessment, which allow your organization to advance on your security journey and better manage your cyber risk.
Learn more about the Arctic Wolf Cyber Resilience Assessment.
Explore how implementing a security operations platform can further your security journey, allowing you to assess, mitigate, and transfer your cyber risk.
