A cyber security risk assessment is about understanding, managing, controlling and mitigating cyber risk across your organization. It is a crucial part of any organization's 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.
OverviewRisk assessments are used to identify, estimate and prioritize risks to organizational operations and assets resulting from the operation and use of information systems.Risk assessment is primarily a business concept and it is all about money. You have to first think about how your organization makes money, how employees and assets affect the profitability of the business, and what risks could result in large monetary losses for the company. After that, you should think about how you could enhance your IT infrastructure to reduce the risks that could lead to the largest financial losses to organization.Basic risk assessment involves only three factors: the importance of the assets at risk, how critical the threat is, and how vulnerable the system is to that threat. Using those factors, you can assess the risk—the likelihood of money loss by your organization. Although risk assessment is about logical constructs, not numbers, it is useful to represent it as a formula: Risk = Asset X Threat X VulnerabilityNevertheless, remember that anything times zero is zero — if, for example, if the threat factor is high and the vulnerability level is high but the asset importance is zero (in other words, it is worth no money to you), your risk of losing money will be zero.There are multiple ways to collect the information you need to assess risk.
For instance, you can:. Interview management, data owners and other employees. Analyze your systems and infrastructure. Review documentationTo begin risk assessment, take the following steps:1. Find all valuable assets across the organization that could be harmed by threats in a way that results in a monetary loss. Here are just a few examples:. Servers.
Website. Client contact information. Partner documents.
Trade secrets. Customer credit card data2.
Identify potential consequences. Determine what financial losses the organization would suffer if a given asset were damaged.
Here are some of the consequences you should care about:. Data loss. System or application downtime. Legal consequences3. Identify threats and their level.
A threat is anything that might exploit a vulnerability to breach your security and cause harm to your assets. Here are some common threats:. Natural disasters. System failure. Accidental human interference.
Malicious human actions (interference, interception or impersonation)4. Identify vulnerabilities and assess the likelihood of their exploitation. A vulnerability is a weakness that allows some threat to breach your security and cause harm to an asset. Think about what protects your systems from a given threat — if the threat actually occurs, what are the chances that it will actually damage your assets? Vulnerabilities can be physical (such as old equipment), problems with software design or configuration (such as excessive access permissions or unpatched workstations), or human factors (such as untrained or careless staff members).5.
Risk is the potential that a given threat will exploit the vulnerabilities of the environment and cause harm to one or more assets, leading to monetary loss. Assess the risk according to the logical formula stated above and assign it a value of high, moderate or low. Then develop a solution for every high and moderate risk, along with an estimate of its cost.6. Create a risk management plan using the data collected. Here are some sample entries:7.
Create a strategy for IT infrastructure enhancements to mitigate the most important vulnerabilities and get management sign-off.8. Define mitigation processes. You can improve your IT security infrastructure but you cannot eliminate all risks. When a disaster happens, you fix what happened, investigate why it happened, and try to prevent it from happening again, or at least make the consequences less harmful. For example, here is a sample mitigation process for a server failure:9. Event (server failure) → Response (use your disaster recovery plan or the vendor’s documentation to get the server up and running) → Analysis (determine why this server failed) → Mitigation (if the server failed due to overheating because of low-quality equipment, ask your management to buy better equipment; if they refuse, put additional monitoring in place so you can shut down the server in a controlled way).
You’ve finished your first risk assessment. But remember that risk assessment is not a one-time event.
Both your IT environment and the threat landscape are constantly changing, so you need to perform risk assessment on a regular basis. Create a risk assessment policy that codifies your risk assessment methodology and specifies how often the risk assessment process must be repeated.Watch our recorded to learn how Netwrix Auditor can help you identify and prioritize your IT risks, and know what steps to take to remediate them.
Handpicked related content:.To get started with IT security risk assessment, you need to answer three important questions:. What are your organization’s critical information technology assets — that is, the data whose exposure would have a major impact on your business operations?. What are the top five business processes that utilize or require this information?. What threats could affect the ability of those business functions to operate?Once you know what you need to protect, you can begin developing strategies. However, before you spend a dollar of your budget or an hour of your time implementing a solution to reduce risk, you should be able to answer the following questions:. What is the risk you are reducing?. Is it the highest priority security risk?.
Are you reducing it in the most cost-effective way?These questions get to the heart of the problem — that it is all about risk. What is Risk?Risk is a business concept — is the likelihood of financial loss for the organization high, medium, low or zero? Three factors play into risk determination: what the threat is, how vulnerable the system is, and the importance of the asset that could be damaged or made unavailable.
Thus, risk can be defined as follows: Risk = Threat x Vulnerability x AssetAlthough risk is represented here as a mathematical formula, it is not about numbers; it is a logical construct. For example, suppose you want to assess the risk associated with the threat of hackers compromising a particular system. If your network is very vulnerable (perhaps because you have no firewall and no antivirus solution), and the asset is critical, your risk is high. However, if you have good perimeter defenses and your vulnerability is low, and even though the asset is still critical, your risk will be medium.There are two special cases to keep in mind:. Anything times zero is zero. If any of the factors is zero, even if the other factors are high or critical, your risk is zero.
Risk implies uncertainty. If something is guaranteed to happen, it is not a risk.Here are some common ways you can suffer financial damage:. Data loss. Theft of trade secrets could cause you to lose business to your competitors. Theft of customer information could result in loss of trust and customer attrition. System or application downtime. If a system fails to perform its primary function, customers may be unable to place orders, employees may be unable to do their jobs or communicate, and so on.
Legal consequences. If somebody steals data from one of your databases, even if that data is not particularly valuable, you can incur fines and other legal costs because you failed to comply with the data protection security requirements of HIPAA, PCI DSS or other complianceNow let’s walk through the procedure. Step #1: Identify and Prioritize AssetsAssets include servers, client contact information, sensitive partner documents, trade secrets and so on. Remember, what you as a technician think is valuable might not be what is actually most valuable for the business. Therefore, you need to work with business users and management to create a list of all valuable assets.
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For each asset, gather the following information, as applicable:. Software. Hardware. Data. Interfaces.
Users. Support personnel. Mission or purpose. Criticality. Functional requirements. IT Security policies. IT Security architecture.
Network topology. Information storage protection. Information flow. Technical security controls. Physical security environment. Environmental securityBecause most organizations have a limited budget for risk assessment, you will likely have to limit the scope of the project to mission-critical assets. Accordingly, you need to define a standard for determining the importance of each asset.
Common criteria include the asset’s monetary value, legal standing and importance to the organization. Once the standard has been approved by management and formally incorporated into the risk assessment security policy, use it to classify each asset you identified as critical, major or minor. Step #2: Identify ThreatsA threat is anything that could exploit a vulnerability to breach security and cause harm to your organization. While hackers and malware probably leap to mind, there are many other types of threats:. Natural disasters. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fire and other natural disasters can destroy much more than a hacker. You can lose not only data, but the servers and appliances as well.
When deciding where to house your servers, think about the chances of a natural disaster. For instance, don’t put your server room on the first floor if your area has a high risk of floods. Dragonvale review. System failure. The likelihood of system failure depends on the quality of your computer For relatively new, high-quality equipment, the chance of system failure is low.
But if the equipment is old or from a “no-name” vendor, the chance of failure is much higher. Therefore, it’s wise to buy high-quality equipment, or at least equipment with good support.
Accidental human interference. This threat is always high, no matter what business you are in. Anyone can make mistakes such as accidentally deleting important files, clicking on malware links, or accidentally physical damaging a piece of equipment. Therefore, you should regularly back up your data, including system settings, ACLs and other configuration information, and carefully track all changes to critical systems. Malicious humans. There are three types of malicious behavior:.
Interference is when somebody causes damage to your business by deleting data, engineering a distributed denial of service (DDOS) against your website, physically stealing a computer or server, and so on. Interception is classic hacking, where they steal your data. Impersonation is misuse of someone else’s credentials, which are often acquired through social engineering attacks or brute-force attacks, or purchased on the dark web.Step #3: Identify VulnerabilitiesThird, we need to spot vulnerabilities. A vulnerability is a weakness that a threat can exploit to breach security and harm your organization. Vulnerabilities can be identified through vulnerability analysis, audit reports, the, vendor data, commercial computer incident response teams, and system software security analysis.Testing the IT system is also an important tool in identifying vulnerabilities. Testing can include the following:. Information Security test and evaluation (ST&E) procedures.
Penetration testing techniques. Automated vulnerability scanning toolsYou can reduce your software-based vulnerabilities with proper patch management. But don’t forget about physical vulnerabilities. For example, moving your server room to the second floor of the building will greatly reduce your vulnerability to flooding.
Step #4: Analyze ControlsAnalyze the controls that are either in place or in the planning stage to minimize or eliminate the probability that a threat will exploit vulnerability in the system. Controls can be implemented through technical means, such as computer hardware or software, encryption, intrusion detection mechanisms, and identification and authentication subsystems.
Nontechnical controls include security policies, administrative actions, and physical and environmental mechanisms.Both technical and nontechnical controls can further be classified as preventive or detective controls. As the name implies, preventive controls attempt to anticipate and stop attacks. Examples of preventive technical controls are encryption and authentication devices. Detective controls are used to discover attacks or events through such means as audit trails and intrusion detection systems.Step #5: Determine the Likelihood of an IncidentAssess the probability that a vulnerability might actually be exploited, taking into account the type of vulnerability, the capability and motivation of the threat source, and the existence and effectiveness of your controls. Rather than a numerical score, many organizations use the categories high, medium and low to assess the likelihood of an attack or other adverse event.
Handpicked related content:.Step #6: Assess the Impact a Threat Could HaveImpact analysis should include the following factors:. The mission of the system, including the processes implemented by the system. The criticality of the system, determined by its value and the value of the data to the organization. The sensitivity of the system and its dataThe information required to conduct an impact analysis can be obtained from existing organizational documentation, including a business impact analysis (BIA) (or mission impact analysis report, as it is sometimes called). This document uses either quantitative or qualitative means to determine the impact that would be caused by compromise or harm to the organization’s information assets.An attack or adverse event can result in compromise or loss of information system confidentiality, integrity and availability.