Cyber confidence is significant for businesses, customer trust and reputation, it is dependent on consistency between threat and security. Cyber-security is the frame of technologies, techniques, and procedures in order to safeguard data, programs, computers, and other security networks.
A threat regarding cyber-security is a potential case of damage to the digital system and network. Businesses in all its forms are increasingly adopting digital technologies. With the increase in cyber security threat, enterprises are facing risks every day. It is essential to manage risk, and risk assessment is the fundamental step. It is an integral part of safety management plan, and it is significant for medium to large enterprises. In 2017 alone China has lost 66.3 billion dollars in cyber-crimes.
Risk and threat assessment is an obligation in modern businesses or else you are exposed to threats. The process should be aligned with the business goals to mitigate risks efficiently. Security threat and risk assessment regarding digital technologies are strategically significant in the 21st century.
The question here is that how risk assessment can be performed on cyber-security threats? It is usually performed on all kind of systems, applications, processes, and functions. But on practical grounds, no organisation can conduct a risk assessment on all of its functions and processes.
Keeping the complexities in mind the first step would be to make an operational framework that is compatible with the scope and size of the organisation. It will consist of detection of an external and internal system which may cause risk to the operations or the process. The examples can be, legally sensitive or protected data like health care, finances, and credit cards. Based on this you can create schedules of risk assessment to cost effectively protect the assets.
After you determine the framework, the next step is to tackle with the individual process for risk assessment. While going through each process, it is significant to note down that there are a lot of categories of risk that can affect your enterprise. Like
Strategic Risk
It is a kind of adverse business decisions, or failure to employ the decision in a way that it is consistent with core policies of the firm.
Reputation Risk
It is the risk which is related to the reputation of the organisation. The public opinion is often significant to the organisation.
Operational Risk
Sometimes faults of employee or failure in the internal process are causes specific process to fail.
Transactional Risk
It is related to the failure of product or service delivery.
Compliance Risk
The violation of regulations and rules to the underlying policies of the organisation is categorised as compliance risk.
Step towards Risk Assessment
Here given below are the necessary step to consider;
Characterisation of the System
The characterisation of the system is key to determine the threats
- What is it?
- The data it uses?
- The vendor?
- The interfaces?
- The system users?
- What is the flow of the data?
- The storage of the information
Threats identification
It is a significant step in which possible threats are analysed against the system. Every risk assessment contains some common threats which are as follows.
- Access Authorization
Unauthorized access can be accidental or due to the malicious attack. It could also be a hacking attempt or due to malware infection.
- Misuse of data by a privileged user
It often happens when an authorised user accesses the sensitive data beyond its official requirement for personal benefit or motives.
- Loss of data
Data loss usually occurs due to poor execution of backup processes.
Determination of security threat and risk assessment
The characterisation of impact in case of threat assessment is done as follows
- High-Substantial impact
- Medium-Damaging but a recoverable impact
- Low-minimal impact
Risk Rating Calculation
There are a lot of calculations required based on the ton of information to assess the risk. But if we keep things simple, it all comes down to a simple equation which will help us to understand it.
Impact * Likelihood = Risk Rating
The result can be imagined as follows
- Severe
In these conditions, necessary remediation is required.
- Severe
At the elevated level of risk, the remedy to the problem needs to be found in limited period.
- Severe
The low threat level is adequate and continuous monitoring is performed to save the organisation from the disaster.
Risk assessment is an integral part of the cyber-security threat rectification and is now adopted by many organisations across the world.
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