The Importance of Cyber Risk Assessments for CISOs

From a certain age, many people go to the doctor regularly for a check-up. This makes sense and is even paid for by health insurance. In this way, risks and dangers can be identified at an early stage and appropriate measures can be taken. The same is true in cyber security: Regular risk assessments help the security teams to identify weak points and potential for optimization. However, such assessments are not carried out across the board.

CISOs have the following advantages when they integrate cybersecurity risk assessments into their work:

• Identify vulnerabilities: A cyber risk assessment helps to identify security gaps in a company’s IT infrastructure, networks and systems. This provides an opportunity to eliminate these vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by cybercriminals.

• Prioritize risk management measures: Not every system is critical, and not all of a company’s data is equally important. The results of the risk assessment clarify which assets and systems are most important and exposed to the highest risk of an attack. On this basis, security managers can prioritize their measures and thus allocate their resources more effectively to tackle the most critical risks first.

• Meet compliance requirements: Almost every company has to comply with various data protection and data security regulations, such as the GDPR or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Many of these legal requirements explicitly require special risk assessments, such as a data protection impact assessment as part of the GDPR. Risk assessments help meet compliance requirements for various regulations. In this way, it can be ensured that the required security standards are met and possible fines or legal consequences in the event of violations are avoided.

• Make intelligent decisions and reduce costs: Cyber ​​risk assessments provide organizations with a comprehensive understanding of their cyber risks. For one, they can use it to make informed decisions about risk mitigation strategies, thereby reducing the likelihood of a successful and costly cyberattack. On the other hand, they are able to make targeted and therefore more effective investments in their cyber security.

The target of most cyber attacks is a company’s data – with enormously costly effects: According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, a data breach causes an average of 4.25 million US dollars in damage. It is therefore worth taking a special look at the data and the risk to which it is exposed.

This is all the more important since data, unlike infrastructure and other systems, is not “uncompromisable”. Servers can be set up again, cloud instances can be rebuilt. However, once stolen, data remains in the hands of cybercriminals. No backups protect against this either.

A recent analysis of almost 10 billion cloud objects as part of data risk assessments at more than 700 companies from a wide range of industries worldwide shows the risks that data is generally exposed to. Accordingly, one in ten data sets in the cloud is accessible to all employees. This creates an internal radius that greatly increases the potential damage in a ransomware attack.

But the lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) also makes it easier for attackers to compromise internally exposed data: On average, every company has almost 4,500 user accounts without activated MFA.

These general results already show the biggest problem areas. Nevertheless, it is important to determine the individual data risk and identify weak points as part of a data risk assessment.

As a rule, companies do not know what data they actually have, where it is stored and who has access to it. Only when you have this basic information can you identify your risk and take targeted action. The time required is manageable at around two to four hours and provides recommendations that can be implemented immediately as part of a detailed report. In addition, other security issues often surface during the assessment process, from ongoing cyberattacks to Kerberos passwords that are up to 15 years old.

With a cyber risk assessment carried out at regular intervals, progress in the area of ​​data security can be clearly documented – also for the management. CISOs finally have a tool at their disposal that makes their cybersecurity successes visible.