Cyber crimes victims are not limited to individuals as government and businesses are the top targets in today's world. PricewaterhouseCoopers research states that “on an average per day 117,339 security incidents are happening”. A Forbes study reveals that by 2021 cybersecurity expenditures will reach one trillion dollars. It is important for every business to understand cyber security and its components to reduce the potential for cybercrime attacks.
Cybersecurity surveys reveal that 92% of the organizations desire to have a well-defined cybersecurity plan and measurement, but only 20% of the organizations are successful in actually implementing one. Most surprising thing is, most of the companies aren’t clear about the guidelines on how to define metrics and measurements for an effective cybersecurity starter.
Security metrics assist businesses to have a proper measure of the effectiveness of the overall security mechanisms of their business systems. More precisely, cybersecurity metrics assists IT security departments to measure whether the internal security policies, governance frameworks, and regulatory measures, are in compliance with the business needs or not.
Well-defined metrics can aid security teams to precisely spot out the gapss in the systems and weak links that are vulnerable to attackers. This way cybersecurity metrics improve the overall security of the business and are critical in locating key drivers of security measurement.
Cybersecurity policy is a set of guidelines that assist the organizations to unify and streamline their security efforts that are must to ensure the protection of an organization’s digital assets. The cybersecurity policy helps the organizations to identify: various assets to be protected, possible attacks on these assets, and measures to be taken to protect these assets.
It clearly lists out the responsibilities and rights the users must adhere to while interacting with the business systems. It includes physical, individual management, hardware and software. The security policy is the key process to translate the management’s security prospects into more quantifiable way (ROI, business alignment, security metrics, and so on).
With the rise in attention for IoT, the discussions are high on the revamping cybersecurity policies guidelines; as it is all together a new technology. In tune with new technology innovations, even cybercrimes are reinventing themselves time-to-time to explore the vulnerabilities. So it is mandatory to conduct cybersecurity policy audit in a timely manner to update it accordingly. This way cybersecurity policy can key to guide businesses designing the cybersecurity roadmap.
Threat is a function of the enemy’s capability and intent to conduct attacks."
David Strachan Morris, Pilgrims Group Limited
Performing cybersecurity threat analysis requires a deeper understanding of diverse network security threats and its patterns, impact and how to avoid them. This entire process is called Cyber threat intelligence. Threat intelligence will enable organizations to predict vulnerabilities that may result in an attack. Threat intelligence tools should be run over all the business systems to check the vulnerabilities or affected systems.
Risk is a function of the probability that your organization will be involved in an attack and the harm that such an attack would cause."
David Strachan Morris, Pilgrims Group Limited
In the field of cybersecurity, the risk is inevitable. The enterprise cybersecurity losses around the globe are approx. $400 billion a year and the cybersecurity expenditure is to touch $1 Trillion by 2021. At this scale, how well the cyber security teams are ready to handle and counter the cybersecurity risk to minimize losses is the key? The cyber attacks are too sophisticated that the cyber attack on Deloitte went unnoticed for months, which resulted in leakage of its top client’s communications and passwords. Another such attack that exposes lack of risk management abilities of the companies is ransomware.
The potential of cybercrime happening aren’t just confined to just loss of money or data, moreover it is resulting in lost brand reputation and customers. In the case of SMBs cybersecurity risks resulting in the shutting down of the businesses itself. This is purely due to the lack of risk assessment and audit mechanisms. Most of the cyber security risks are business risks. Handling risks in the true sense is about due diligence. To mitigate risks and to chart out the risk assessment plan requires an understanding of business priorities, digital assets significance, security effectiveness, incident response plans, security policy, and so on.