The Importance of a Robust Cyber Risk Management

1. Lack of visibility: A majority of security professionals are apprehensive about ransomware and phishing attacks. Limited visibility of such attacks and the burden of being flooded with several alerts to act upon are further substantial concerns. The lack of visibility has triggered many challenges for businesses. For instance, how are they supposed to resist threats that they do not even know about? What businesses need are solutions that operationalize threat intelligence and provide real-time protection and several layers of security from recognized bad locations. They must have access to solutions that can spot an array of cyber threats and offer better visibility of risks pertinent to their industry.

2. Prioritizing cyber risks: Handling growing cyber threats can be overwhelming. The possibility of a failure is well known, but businesses never seem to have a sufficient workforce or financial plan to manage it all in real-time. What do you do first? In today’s rapidly growing threat vectors and cyberattacks, no one can endure without having a proper risk prioritization plan in place. A key driver in determining the priorities is to stay agile in the face of swiftly changing cyber threats, business conditions, company goals, and technology defences.

Cyber risk prioritization has to be evaluated in a big-picture framework, tied to key business objectives, and considered against a credible danger-versus-resources assessment. Of course, that is done at the top, possibly with substantial input from the board, and it must be conveyed clearly to all stakeholders.

3. Communicating cyber risks to the board and management: Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) often find it hard to express the significance of security to the top leadership and validate further investments for their endeavors, regardless of how crucial they are. It is tough to instill the principles of security into the larger business model, even if they are key to reduce the risk of incidents, such as damaging data breaches.

The ability to show how security initiatives can help the business slash time and reduce costs on certain processes is an ideal way to show your department’s competence. It is particularly crucial when CISOs are asking for the allocation of more budget. To support the argument, it is recommended to have a metrics-heavy dialogue.

4. Sophisticated ransomware: Ransomware attacks are rising daily, and business leaders and IT professionals need to have a robust recovery strategy against such attacks to protect their business. There have been several submissions about the advancement of ransomware and the wait-and-watch game between fraudsters who are seeking ways to get around detection abilities and guards looking for ways to thwart them. Rather than arbitrarily encrypting data, offenders are focusing on high-value business data to encrypt and hold to ransom.

The recent Digital Defense Report by Microsoft has taken a profound look into cybercrime trends, applying its expertise and insights into enterprise, server, desktop and cloud networks. The report mentions ransomware as the most troublesome threat, and the most widespread reason behind its own incident response engagements. The report shows that the threat actors have devoted less time within a system once they have got access to it. They have taken advantage of the turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and initiated attacks much sooner.

5. Cloud risks: Businesses are relocating their classified data to the cloud from legacy data centres, because of the cost and flexibility involved in legacy data centres. Shifting data to the cloud requires appropriate configuration and security procedures in place or else there is a possibility of businesses falling into a trap. Cloud service providers secure only their own platform. The responsibility of securing a firm’s infrastructure from theft & deletion on the cloud lies with the firm. Current incident response teams must have the necessary skills and tools to perform forensics on cloud data. Leaders must challenge their teams on their preparation and capability to supervise and act in response to security attacks in the cloud.

6. Staff and skills shortage: Cyber risks today have become more sophisticated than ever, and this has triggered a steady pattern of relying too much on point products to shield against threats. While technology is key to this objective, it is not a standalone answer. Often, mid-market firms lack devoted cybersecurity personnel that are just as important. This skill shortage has been exacerbated by the pandemic as the network graph has broadened to include at-home laptops and other WFH access points. According to a report by Verizon, almost one in three data infringements in 2020 involved small firms, and the situation will improve only with a combination of processes, people, and technology. Hiring more security specialists together with outsourced professionals is the only way forward.

7. Perpetually evolving risks: The polymorphism particularly with respect to malware is something that you cannot do much about. Polymorphic malware is dangerous, damaging computer software such as a virus, worm, or spyware. It can change its form frequently, making it tough for anti-malware programs to identify it. That is why companies must consider adding an additional layer of protection, on top of the antivirus tool.

A company’s first line of security cover must be a product that can act proactively to pinpoint malware. It must have the ability to block access to malevolent servers and stem data leakage. Part of this protective layer’s role is to keep your system safe by patching susceptibilities fast. As cyber risks grow, and cyber-attacks become more hostile and extreme measures could become the norm.

The susceptibility to cyberattacks will grow if billions of hackable smart devices are attached to an IoT network. Today the IoT devices market is not standardized and therefore not obligated to fulfil certain security requirements, despite instances of cyberattacks. It is thus essential that IoT devices are shielded from the beginning to protect personal data, business-sensitive information, and critical infrastructure.

According to the 2019 Brookings report, 5G networks are more vulnerable to cyberattacks than their antecedents because the network has moved from an integrated, hardware-based switching to distributed, software-specified digital routing and the remarkable expansion of bandwidth in 5G builds additional possibilities of attack.