What Is a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and How Is It Performed?

Cybersecurity has never been more important. Organizations of all sizes — from multinational corporations to local nonprofits — must consider their cybersecurity infrastructure and practices to stay safe and effective. But, to know how to improve cybersecurity, an organization must first understand the threats facing it and where it might be vulnerable. That’s where a cybersecurity risk assessment comes in.

What Is a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?

A cybersecurity risk assessment is an evaluation of an organization’s ability to protect its information and systems from ever-evolving cyber threats. The purpose of these types of risk evaluations is to identify, assess, and prioritize the risks an organization faces to its data and information systems. It also helps organizations communicate those risks to their stakeholders and make informed decisions about how to allocate resources to address those risks.

The Importance of Cybersecurity Assessments

These assessments are necessary to stay one step ahead of threat actors. A cyberattack can be extremely damaging, causing a loss of money, productivity, and public trust. Today, organizations face an increasing number of threats, including:

• Attacks are on the rise: In 2023, there were 2,365 cyberattacks, which was not only an all-time record but a 72% increase on the previous record of data breaches from 2021.

• Stolen credentials enable further attacks: Sadly, attacks aren’t always a one-time event. With a data breach, malicious actors can steal and keep credentials and sensitive information. They can use or sell the credentials to execute further breaches.

• Organizations’ cloud data is often unsecured: Cloud systems are incredibly useful for many organizations, but they present another vulnerability. Cloud data often lacks proper security, putting companies at risk.

• Data leaks have reputational and legal ramifications: Some effects of a cyberattack are obvious, such as organizational disruption and an interruption of productivity. Furthermore, a company may have to pay off its attackers in cases of ransomware. However, less obvious is reputational damage. If a business loses its customers’ data in a beach, those customers may lose faith in that business. There are also potential legal ramifications if an organization doesn’t keep its customers’ and employees’ data sufficiently protected.

Benefits of a Cyber Risk Assessment:

A cybersecurity assessment is often the first step toward avoiding all the above threats and setbacks. Specifically, an assessment can have benefits, such as:

• Better security: The main impetus of an assessment is to increase cybersecurity. Without first doing an assessment, an organization can’t know where or how to dedicate its resources because it doesn’t know where its vulnerabilities are.

• Peace of mind: When an organization knows it has effective cybersecurity measures, tools, and protocols in place, its executives, employees, and customers can all move forward confidently. Nobody has to worry about sharing certain information because of potentially inadequate security.

• Another selling point: Because an organization can boast it has recently undergone a cybersecurity risk assessment and has addressed any vulnerabilities it discovered, customers and clients may feel more comfortable doing business with that organization.

• Knowledge: Knowledge is power. The more an organization learns about cybersecurity, its vulnerabilities, and the best tools to address those vulnerabilities, the more it can protect itself in the future.

Conducting a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment

Risk mitigation begins with a comprehensive assessment. It’s important to follow certain steps when conducting cyber risk assessments to ensure the information you’ve gathered is useful and produces actionable insights. Here are some steps to follow:

Preparing for a Security Assessment:

Before even beginning the cybersecurity risk assessment, it’s important to take some preparatory actions. These include:

Set Clear Objectives

It’s always valuable to establish what you want to achieve before embarking on an endeavor. It’s helpful to be as specific as possible in these cases. “Improve cybersecurity” is typically the goal of cybersecurity risk assessments, but it’s too broad to help guide you through the process. More valuable objectives might be “optimize resources” or “identify the most common threats” in a business’s industry.

Set the Scope

An in-depth assessment of a portion of an organization’s IT environment is better than a surface overview of all systems and potential threats. Some companies have vast and complex IT operations and others have limited budgets. It may be necessary to limit the scope of a risk assessment to ensure accurate and actionable information.

Find the Right Team

Who does the risk analysis can be just as important as the scope and objectives of that analysis. Organizations must find the right partner for their cybersecurity needs. Cybersecurity risk management professionals with experience and the best tools can conduct a thorough and insightful assessment for any company.

How Do Professionals Perform These Assessments?

Different cybersecurity professionals may approach risk assessments differently, especially when aiming for differing objectives and on behalf of organizations in varied industries. Below are some steps that are usually involved in effective cyber risk assessments:

Audit Data

Just what information are you protecting? Many organizations can’t answer this question with specificity. That’s why creating an asset and data inventory is an effective early step in a security risk assessment.

A data audit helps organizations better understand their applications, cloud workloads, and accounts, allowing them to identify potentially critical security gaps. It’s also important to identify the sensitive data and IP the organization values most. This allows a company to take the right steps to ensure they protect these high-value items above all else.

Identify Vulnerabilities and Threats

After identifying what you want to protect, you must identify what you’re protecting against. Every organization has vulnerabilities and weaknesses in its IT environment. Here are some common ones to be cognizant of:

• Insufficiently protected endpoints.
• IT misconfigurations.
• Too many accounts or people with administrative privileges.
• Unmanaged exposed assets.
• Unpatched applications.
• Weak passwords.

What are the items in the above list vulnerable to? Here are some common and emerging threats:

• Insider threats.
• Malware.
• Phishing scams.
• Ransomware.
• SQL injections.

Calculate Risk Probability

How probable is a given attack? What would be the result of said attack? These questions illustrate the value of working with highly respected cybersecurity experts. Such professionals can inform you if a potential threat is a common issue for organizations in your position. 

Perform a Cost-Benefit Analysis

A given cybersecurity threat may not be likely to hurt your organization given the nature of your business and your IT infrastructure. However, protecting against that threat may be simple and relatively cheap. 

For example, many insider threats are not malicious; they occur because staff don’t have the proper training to avoid making an unauthorized change or falling for a phishing scam. An hour-long annual training session may neutralize most of these issues, so the cost-benefit analysis would suggest it’s a worthy initiative.

Take Security Measures

At this point in the security risk assessment, you should have a good idea of what to do. Which security controls your organization requires depends on the results of the other aspects of the assessment, but some common cybersecurity measures include:

• Data encryption.
• Employee training programs.
• Hardware and/or software patching.
• Multi-factor authentication.
• Security tooling.

Track Results

The final step in the risk assessment process isn’t really final at all. The truth is, cyber resilience is an ongoing endeavor. After a cybersecurity risk analysis, your organization’s risk level will probably be low. But threat actors are always fine-tuning their nefarious tools and methods. By tracking the results of your cybersecurity safeguards, you can keep abreast of where risks are coming from and how your organization is holding up against them.

What Tools Are Useful for Cybersecurity Assessment? 

There are many tools available that can help with cybersecurity risk management. A professional may recommend different tools depending on your cybersecurity posture, but some of the more common technologies are:

• External attack surface management: Attack surface discovery and vulnerability tools help reveal unpatched vulnerabilities.

• Penetration tests: A penetration test basically mimics an actual cyberattack. Doing this tests your cybersecurity measures and tools, probing for subtle risks and vulnerabilities that may not be visible during a routine vulnerability scan.

• Risk management and compliance software: With compliance software, you can identify possible compliance gaps.

• Security monitoring and incident response tools: Monitoring risk and preparing for the proper response is integral to long-term cybersecurity. These tools are useful for maintaining visibility and control over security architecture.

• Threat intelligence: By understanding the tactics, techniques, and procedures of threat actors, you can prioritize and mitigate risks more effectively. And by safeguarding your brand’s reputation through consistently monitoring cyber threats, you can build customer trust.

Level Up Your Cybersecurity With Greystone

Greystone can perform the cybersecurity risk assessment you need. We provide top-of-the-line cybersecurity tools and premium IT services. We have the tools and expertise to help your organization practice expert risk mitigation and respond to any cybersecurity incident. Please contact us today to learn more.