3 Signs Your Cybersecurity Program Isn’t Effective
Modern business demands and the accompanying shifts to digitization have facilitated exciting new ways to bring convenience and speed in the world of work. However, as we have seen in recent years, digital business also comes with inherent threats for organizations of all sizes and industries.
?Cyber-attacks are on the rise among businesses of all sizes, and in virtually every industry.
Consider these statistics:
Cyber threats can come from anywhere – but do you know where?
Bad actors try to target the weakest link across exposure points, including your core infrastructure, identities, network, data, devices, and apps to gain access to corporate resources and valuable data.
Cyber threats can come from anywhere — whether bad actors trying to compromise credentials and breach your systems or employees not following privacy and encryption standards on sensitive data. It only takes one weak link to wreak havoc.
?Now more than ever, it pays to invest in robust cybersecurity measures.
A data breach or malware can result in highly expensive downtime for your business, and if any of your customers’ personal data is compromised, your company’s reputation could be damaged for years to come.?
The real question is:
Is your cybersecurity program effective and efficient enough to tell you where and how cyber threats may impact your organization – and how to address them?
In this edition of our expert chat series, Jason Lewis, Plus+ cybersecurity consultant, discusses what an effective cybersecurity program looks like, the 3 signs that it may not be achieving what it should, and how to fix it.
Cyber Threats Can Bring Your Organization to a Halt
With the number of data breaches and other cyber-attacks on the rise, several organizations have already felt the pain from cyber-attacks. By now, the range of potential business impacts are more frequent and well known.
Some of the most common potential consequences of an ineffective cybersecurity program include:
Loss of intellectual property
Cyber-enabled fraud leads to monetary losses and distribution of stolen data on the Dark Web can exacerbate the costs.
Data loss
Including customer’s confidential information and crucial business information. A successful cyberattack could lock you out of your company’s critical databases – or even worse, hold it hostage for a ransom. Or, a malware attack may alter, erase or overwrite vital information, costing time and money to recover.
Direct financial losses
The costs from cyberthreats can add up quickly:?according to the?latest data from IBM ?the average cost of a data breach exceeds $4 million.
Disruptions and outages
System access may be disrupted making you unable to run the business. The size of the outage and productivity loss will vary depending upon the nature and scope of the attack. This also has a varied degree of IT burden as they work to find the causes, clean up damages and fix the vulnerabilities.
Regulatory fines and loss of business
In addition to direct costs, there is the risk of monetary penalties and loss of business for organizations that fail to comply with regulatory requirements and industry best practices. Defense industry suppliers are particularly exposed as they are required to?be prepared for CMMC .
Reputational damage
Loss of customer and stakeholder trust can translate directly into a loss of business, as well as devaluation of the brand you've worked so hard to build.?
Other indirect costs
In addition to the economic costs of incident response, there are several intangible impacts such as operational disruption, slowdowns in innovation and reduced competitiveness that have strategic impacts.
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What It Takes to Build an Effective Cybersecurity Program
Now that we know the importance of having an effective cybersecurity program, let’s review what it takes to build one.
Start with the business strategy
To make your cybersecurity program efficient and effective, you need to begin with the business strategy. The next step is to identify the risks and possible consequences that could impact the successful implementation of that strategy.?
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From there, determine how those risks are related to the potential outcomes, such as loss of systems access, availability of intellectual property or your customer data or business intelligence.?This provides the necessary visibility that clearly connects external and internal cyber risks to their possible outcomes for clear-eyed decision making.
Next, determine how the people processes in technology could be influenced to mitigate or otherwise treat the risk, or other words, make it go away.?These practices are known as controls and there are a number of frameworks you can use to guide the implementation of controls.
Keep in mind that these?security and risk management frameworks ?should be viewed as templates to guide efforts. In fact, some are more directional than prescriptive. The more important point here is to tailor the controls to your specific needs for a good fit with minimal unnecessary disruption and investment. A well designed?cyber risk and gap assessment ?can help with this.?
Avoid a bottom-up approach
Another key point is that frameworks may not directly align to what is important to your organization. They may not help you manage risk to the company's strategic goals because they're more fitted to day-to-day operations vs. overall strategic imperatives. Be sure to avoid these bottom-up approaches to cybersecurity. Stay focused on business impacts strategy goal and alignment.
At some point an executive will want to know whether the cost was worth it, and they will begin to look at the metrics. In a lot of organizations, the focus of information security and related risk management is on the wrong things. In many cases, management is looking at whether the tools (technology) are working. Instead, what they should be looking at is how effective the tools are at enabling business strategies and managing risks in the way of those strategies.?
?The irony is that grabbing off-the-shelf tools putting them together and without first having a clear idea of how they're supposed to work together and interrelate. You can create blind spots in your security program which as you probably know wind up driving even more expenditures.
So, to recap,?an effective cybersecurity program has the following positive characteristics:?
The 3 Signs That Your Cybersecurity Program is Not Effective
Now that we’ve covered what effectiveness and efficiency looks like, here are three red flags that your program isn’t as effective and efficient as it could be.
Sign #1: You Can’t Determine How Security Issues Impact the Business
The first sign is that you can't determine how problems in your cyber security posture impact your business.
As mentioned above, this could be in the form of financial losses, operational disruptions or reputational hits, IP theft, as well other downsides. Cyber criminals may find a way to access and exfiltrate intellectual property that you spent $ millions to produce altering your accounts payables losing you money or some other act that directly impacts your business.?
Either way you won't really know because you won’t have the understanding to associate the threats, and their related risks, with the ability to achieve strategic goals like revenue growth or operational efficiency.
Sign #2: A Focus on Technology Instead of Business Impact
Implementing the right tools and controls is certainly important. And at Plus+ we help medium and large organizations?implement security controls ?every day.
However, technology and process shouldn’t be the sole focus.?
If you find that you’re paying too much attention to what your tools say about threats and remediation instead of the finding itself, then you may get caught blindsided.
Vulnerability scans don’t provide a complete picture.
For example, your vulnerability scans might indicate an issue rated as medium severity. And you may choose to ignore medium severity vulnerabilities.?
The problem is, you may not know what the exploitation of that vulnerability will lead to as a possible impact to the business without the right interpretation backed up by additional investigation and root cause analysis.
The tool ratings and recommendations are completely generic. They only tell you so much about the specific impacts to your business. Therefore, tool ratings and recommendations can be helpful, but also misleading.
Instead, prioritize findings based on potential business impact.
A low or medium ranked issue in the tool may prove to represent a weak link in your business flow. After further investigation, you may discover that it is actually a critical gap that significantly increases risk.
Sign #3: Security Investments Are Hard to Justify
Probably because of the previous signs mentioned, cyber security investments can be very hard for information security groups to justify incremental investments and prove how plans and efforts will benefit the business financially. Without this, it can be quite challenging to either maintain or improve the program, since you are likely competing for resources with several other areas of the business.
Don’t resort to fear and uncertainty (FUD)
Because of this, many groups resort to fear, uncertainty and doubt, otherwise known as ‘FUD’.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a technique that some businesses use to influence opinion and achieve their goals. It usually involves negatively toned communications and information designed to instill ‘fear and doubt’, or otherwise strong emotional reactions from the intended audience. Much of this may rightly be based in fact for sure. However, using fear of loss alone isn’t as effective as conveying the potential upside along with the downside. This is really what executives deserve to make clearly informed business decisions.
Continued business support and funding is clearly essential for any IT / digital initiative. The same holds true for cybersecurity programs.
Unfortunately for many programs, the only reason that they still exist is because they rely on FUD rather than the ability to show positive outcomes and returns on investment.
Are You Seeing Any of These Signs in Your Organization?
Cybersecurity isn't just an IT problem. It’s a business imperative. Cybersecurity attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, with the number of targeted attacks by cyber-criminal groups looking for sensitive data continuing to rise. As a result, the need to build an effective program to defend against threats is more important than ever.?
If you recognize any of these signs in your organization, we can help.??
Get the guidance and capabilities you need for peace of mind knowing your sensitive business assets are safeguarded. We can help you navigate the rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape and secure your business now and in the future against the constantly changing range of cyber threats.
To get started,?speak with one of our cybersecurity advisors today .
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