How can you assess the impact of a successful attack on your risk assessment?

For precise assessment of the impact: Identify affected assets, such as data, systems, or applications. Quantify financial, operational, and reputational losses resulting from the attack. Evaluate the impact on business operations, including downtime and productivity loss. Consider regulatory compliance implications and potential penalties. Assess the impact on customers, partners, and stakeholders, including loss of trust and damage to relationships. Update the risk assessment process with findings to prioritize response efforts and strengthen risk management strategies.

Assessing the impact of a successful attack on your risk assessment begins with clearly defining the scope of the attack. This involves identifying the systems, assets, and processes affected. Understanding the scope helps in estimating the potential damage and determining the necessary resources for response and recovery. It's crucial to consider both direct and indirect impacts, such as operational disruptions, reputational damage, regulatory consequences, and potential legal ramifications. The scope definition should also include the timeframe over which the impact is likely to unfold, allowing for a more accurate assessment of the long-term consequences.

For industrial systems, make sure you evaluate the non-cyber impacts that are more aligned to traditional operational technology incidents. Think safety and reliability. Would this incident cause a safety incident? If so, how bad? There are already (sadly) models around loss of health and human safety-- and during an industrial cyber incident, those models suddenly become "cyber models," too. Work side-by-side with your safety risk officers and also learn how your industrial organization quantifies property and casualty damages for insurance purposes. These can provide invaluable information when examining losses due to safety or reliability events.

Once the scope is established, quantifying the losses is the next step. This involves assessing the financial, operational, and reputational impacts of the successful attack. Financial losses may include direct costs like system repairs, legal fees, and regulatory fines, as well as indirect costs such as loss of revenue due to downtime and customer attrition. Operational losses may involve disruptions to business processes and decreased productivity. Reputational losses are often harder to quantify but can have long-lasting effects on customer trust and brand value. Assigning monetary values to these losses enables a more objective and comprehensive evaluation of the impact.

A avalia?ao dos controles deve aer feita de forma periodica,pois eles fazem parte da estrategia de SI. S?o basicamente o bra?o operacional da SI.

Evaluate the effectiveness of existing security controls in preventing, detecting, and mitigating the impact of the attack. This involves a thorough review of security policies, technologies, and procedures in place. Identify any weaknesses or gaps in the controls that allowed the attack to succeed. Consider factors such as the timeliness of detection, the efficiency of response mechanisms, and the adequacy of employee training. Assessing the controls helps in understanding whether improvements are needed in the areas of intrusion prevention, incident response, data encryption, employee awareness, and other security measures. Strengthening controls is essential to minimizing the impact of future attacks.

Current digital age, your organization resources are bound to change/ increase. Hence addition to all these, design process to have continuous risk assessments which will determine likelihood and impact of such successful attack along with actionable and prioritised tasks.

Factors Influencing Likelihood of Attack: User behavior: Assess vulnerabilities related to user actions. Security product logs: Analyze data from security tools. Cloud app activity: Consider usage patterns in cloud applications. Existing security policies and compliance: Evaluate adherence to regulations. Threats and vulnerabilities: Identify and prioritize weaknesses

The risk matrix is a tool used to visualize and prioritize risks based on their likelihood and impact. After a successful attack, it's crucial to update the risk matrix to reflect the new understanding of the threat landscape. This involves revisiting the risk assessments for identified vulnerabilities and reassessing the likelihood and impact considering the recent incident. Adjust risk ratings accordingly and prioritize mitigation efforts based on the updated risk profile. The risk matrix provides a dynamic framework for ongoing risk management and helps organizations focus resources on addressing the most critical threats.

Continuous monitoring and regular reviews are essential components of effective risk management. After an attack, establish an ongoing monitoring process to track the effectiveness of newly implemented controls and to identify any emerging threats or vulnerabilities. Conduct regular reviews of incident response procedures and update them based on lessons learned from the successful attack. Monitor changes in the threat landscape, regulatory requirements, and technology to ensure that the risk assessment remains current and relevant. Regularly communicating updates to stakeholders, including management and employees, helps maintain a proactive and adaptive cybersecurity posture.

What is usually forgotten to monitor, is to monitor for leaked data/credentials/… on Surface, Deep and Dark Web. Ideally, there should be a process in order to launch an “Intelligence Requirement” in order to found possible data due to the incident. Sometimes, the data is available (for sell) multiple weeks after the incident happened.

It is also important to hear the voice of stakeholders and ask them to engage. It is important to ask them to comment and share their vision on how to prevent incidents in the future and be as transparent as possible.

Remember, as IT infrastructures and services become more integrated the scale of impact from a security incident may be significant. Potentially more significant that the initially impacted data may indicate. Understanding the inter-dependencies in your infrastructure will help scope out the overall/ potential impact of the security incident. So determine what actions to take and what/ where potential revisions to your security model, etc., need to be undertaken. So, do not restrict any risk assessment, etc., solely to the data and possibly the primary application that manages that data. As that may not provide a clear indication of the scale of impact of the security incident that was (is) experienced..