What Is a Cyber Risk Assessment?
A cyber risk assessment (also known as a cybersecurity assessment) is a key component of a risk management program. Cyber risk assessments consider organizations’ people, processes, and technology to define and rank risk based on likelihood and impact of an attack. Because risk management is an ongoing process, organizations should set up a manageable and realistic cadence for ongoing risk assessments, especially as the organization grows and adds new people, processes, and technology.
There are risk assessment frameworks and risk assessment tools to help organizations conduct a risk assessment and better manage risk, including those offered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Center for Internet Security (CIS).
Why Should an Organization Conduct a Cyber Risk Assessment?
Cyber risk assessments help decision makers at organizations prioritize elements of their risk management program by helping them identify:
- Relevant threats they face
- Existing internal and external vulnerabilities
- The potential organizational impact from threat actors exploiting those vulnerabilities
- The likelihood that exploitation will may occur
Additionally, a risk assessment can influence which tools and solutions are added to an organization’s tech stack, what amount of budget is allocated for IT staff, and the implementation of security policies to reduce risk such as threat detection and response and identity and access management (IAM) frameworks.
How To Perform a Cyber Risk Assessment
There are two major ways to conduct a cyber risk assessment: through internal stakeholders, or with assistance from a third-party provider.
If your team has the skills, experience, and availability to conduct an internal risk assessment, you’ll want to build a core team consisting of leaders in IT, Finance, HR, and the C-suite. However, this will be a time-consuming process pulling these leaders away from other high-priority projects.
That’s why many organizations turn to a third-party for assistance in their risk assessment.
We’ll outline full cyber risk assessments below, but it’s important to focus on two components, inventory and risks. Taking proper inventory creates visibility, allowing for organization to scrutinize the IT environment and set up better threat monitoring. Risks help an organization understand internal and external weaknesses and assess what kinds of risk should be prioritized and how the attack surface should best be hardened.
Inventory
For any organization looking to effectively assess risk, a thorough inventory of assets is a critical step. This means cataloging:
- Endpoints: Desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and servers
- Network devices: Routers, modems, switches, and bridges
- IoT devices: Anything connected to the internet, from security card readers to printers
- Data: All personal information, sensitive information and intellectual property stored by your organization
- Users: Every employee and third-party individual, including what they have access to, where they work, and what devices they work on
CIS provides a free Hardware and Software Asset Tracker, which makes the inventory process even easier. This simple tool allows you to track your hardware, software, and sensitive data in a single, shareable spreadsheet.
Risk Points
Identify the threats your assets face using publicly available tools and resources like CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog. This step of the process can be quite time-consuming, but it is crucial, as it will help IT and security teams understand weaknesses within the IT environment, including:
- Computer and server vulnerabilities
- Firewall vulnerabilities
- Newly installed system components and assets
- Misconfigured device
- Unpatched software
- Website flaws in services like Apache and WebCalendar
- Exposure of sensitive files
- Brute force weaknesses
- Weak SSL/TLS configurations and self-signed certificates
Key steps in a cyber risk assessment include:
- Set parameters and goals for the assessment
- Choose a framework (e.g. NIST CSF) to measure your assessment against
- Inventory all assets
- Identify key threats, vulnerabilities, and points of risk
- Document results and prioritize risks discovered based on business and security goals
- Analyze and implement new cybersecurity controls post assessment
Explore how to conduct a cyber risk assessment, analyze the results, and implement key cybersecurity controls with our full how-to guide.
Who Should Perform a Cyber Risk Assessment?
Short answer: everyone. Whether you’re a small business with only a few employees and endpoints, or a large enterprise with multiple physical locations and distributed cloud networks, every organization can benefit greatly from understanding the risks they face, and the damage exploit could cause.
In the modern threat landscape, it’s a matter of when not if an organization will experience a cyber attack, so actively reducing risk is paramount to any successful cybersecurity strategy.
Arctic Wolf Cyber Resilience Assessment
The Arctic Wolf Cyber Resilience Assessment allows organizations to map their security posture against industry standard frameworks to help prioritize risk mitigation initiatives. 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 how a Security Operations approach can radically reduce cyber risk with the 2025 Arctic Wolf Security Operations Report.
Explore how implementing a security operations platform can further your security journey, allowing you to assess, mitigate, and transfer your cyber risk
