How to Conduct a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment (2024)

A cybersecurity risk assessment is a process organizations go through to identify, categorize, and respond to security risks. This could include unpatched vulnerabilities, poor access controls, phishing – and much more. The goal is to get an understanding of your overall risk threshold, so you can identify strategies and policies to help reduce it.

While the goal of a risk assessment might be fairly simple, the process of creating one is a little more complex. Here’s everything you need to know to get it right.

Do I Need a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?

All organizations need to think carefully about their security defenses and the key threats facing them. The larger and more well-known your business is, the more important this becomes, and the more stringent your defenses need to be. While smaller businesses can generally make do with outsourced or slimmed-down cybersecurity risk management, most organizations need to at least consider the steps we discuss in this blog.

The end product of the process should be to create a risk assessment document that can help non-technical business executives make strategic decisions about budgets, policies, and procedures.

Effective security is a careful balancing act – and it always will be. It’s important to target the resources you have to the most critical threats and vulnerabilities. Your goal should be to eliminate every risk. Instead, you should aim to reduce your overall level of risk as much as possible with the resources you have. A risk assessment should give you the tools and information to make these strategic decisions.

Cybersecurity Risk Assessment vs. Vulnerability Assessment

A cybersecurity risk assessment is similar to a vulnerability assessment, but differs in several key ways:

Vulnerability Assessment

This is generally much more limited in scope, usually involving a scan to identify specific technical vulnerabilities like unpatched software, insecure code, and misconfigurations. The process is largely automated and involves correlating your IT setup with known security vulnerabilities.

Cybersecurity risk assessment

A risk assessment, on the other hand, is a much broader and more qualitative analysis. It aims to identify, assess, and prioritize all security risks, including data, systems, human error, and reputation. Crucially, it should involve technical security considerations as well as things like business context, processes, existing defenses, and the nature of potential risks.

You may choose to do a vulnerability assessment alongside or as part of the full risk assessment, but it’s important to be aware of the differing objectives and scope of each exercise.

The Challenge of Defining Risk

To identify and reduce your cybersecurity risk, it’s important first to define it. After all, not every security threat is equally as dangerous. There are several factors that can influence how critical a particular security risk could be:

1. Threat Severity & Availability

Some cyber risks or vulnerabilities are inherently more risky and others are more likely to get exploited.

2. System Criticality

Not all IT systems are equally as important. An attack on a mission-critical or customer-facing application will be significantly more damaging than most other IT systems.

3. Existing Security

If you’ve got effective security controls like multi-factor authentication in place around particularly critical systems, a vulnerability will be less likely to succeed and incur damage.

4. Level of Damage

There are many different ways an attack can harm your business, including loss of trade secrets, downtime, loss of business, reputational damage, or legal penalties.

It’s important to be aware of these differing risk factors and how they apply to your specific organization and IT setup.

Getting Your Priorities in Check

Before we can start planning the risk assessment, it’s helpful to first understand the kinds of cyber risks you’ll be facing and the questions you’ll ask to identify the best response. Here are some of the most common types of attacks organizations face:

• Ransomware
• Data leaks
• Phishing
• Malware
• Insider threats
• Denial of service (DOS/DDOS) attacks

As we’ll discuss below, the risk assessment requires a careful consideration of the biggest threats and the resources you have available to mitigate them. No single framework or process can tell you how to make these decisions – as ultimately it’s a qualitative assessment that requires the careful balancing of competing priorities.

To get this right, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself throughout the risk assessment:

• What resources do you have to implement security protections, patches, or defenses?
• How do those protections impact overall organization productivity?
• Which types of data breaches are you most vulnerable to?
• What is the likelihood of exploitation and its associated potential impact?
• How and which cyber attacks will affect your ability to function as a business?
• Where do sensitive data or mission-critical systems sit in your IT environment?
• What is the level of risk you’re willing to accept?
• Where are the key vulnerabilities or entry points into your IT environment?

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. But broadly, these are the kinds of considerations you’ll need to make when diagnosing your cyber security response.

Step-by-step: The Complete Risk Assessment Process

When conducting your cybersecurity risk assessment, the specific systems you’ll assess and priorities you’ll identify will be specific to your organization. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as running a scan and analyzing the results – though any scans you do run will certainly come in handy.

That being said, organizations will generally follow a fairly defined process to identify, categorize, and document security risks. Here are the six main steps you’ll need to follow as part of this approach:

1.   Identify and Prioritize Assets

The first step is to survey your IT environment and catalog the information and systems within it. A good place to start is to run an asset discovery scan, using some form of network of vulnerability scanning tool. You should also correlate this with your own general knowledge of the IT network to make sure it’s comprehensive. It’s also important to take into account what third-party systems your employees have access to (and vice versa) as these could also create entry points for hackers.

But simply knowing what IT assets and systems you have is only the start. You also need to gather as much information as possible about the information, applications, or systems they store. This ultimately, is why risk assessments are so subjective and qualitative – because the answers to these questions will always be specific to your organization. Here are the kinds of questions you should consider at this stage:

• Do we have sensitive data? If so, which regulatory standards govern the use of this data?
• How and where is this data stored?
• What existing protections already exist?
• Who has access? Include customers, employees, stakeholders, and other third-party vendors.
• How crucial is this asset to the uptime and availability of particular systems?

From here, the goal is to identify the most vital assets to protect. Ultimately, that’s likely to be anything protecting sensitive data or mission-critical systems like servers, websites, or customer-facing applications. You may also want to protect trade secrets, business strategies, and other intellectual property, where relevant.

By the end of this step, you should have a comprehensive outline of your organization’s data and infrastructure, as well as the specific systems most in need of protection.

2.   Identify Cyber Threats and Vulnerabilities

Now you have an idea of the data and systems being protected, it’s time to start correlating that with the cyber risks and vulnerabilities that could attack them. This stage is about recognizing potential security issues before they can be exploited.

You should begin by identifying and classifying the attacks most likely to cause disruption. These could include:

• Unauthorized access: Breaches where attackers gain access to systems or data without permission.
• Misuse of information by authorized users: Situations where insiders misuse their access privileges.
• Weaknesses in organizational security controls: Identifying flaws in existing security measures that could be exploited.
• Data leaks and breaches: Risks of sensitive information being exposed or lost, either intentionally or accidentally.
• Service disruption: Threats like denial of service (DoS) attacks that could disrupt or disable critical services.

The goal of a cybersecurity vulnerability is to define the full scope of risks your business faces. That includes everything from an unpatched vulnerability to employees leaking sensitive data. You have to think about everything that could affect your bottom line before diagnosing the solution.

Bogdan Dolohan, Head of IT and Support, Heimdal®

It can also be helpful at this stage to run a vulnerability scan. This will analyze the assets in your IT environment and correlate that with an industry-recognized database of known vulnerabilities. This helps identify specific exploits that could be used to attack your organization. There are many specialist vulnerability scanning and management tools on the market that can help with this task.

You might also choose to refer to data on vulnerability severity from the common vulnerability scoring system. This is another industry-recognized database that ranks the relative severity of different vulnerabilities. While this is useful, it can’t account for the specific risk to your organization; high-severity vulnerability can still attack non-critical systems. So it’s important to balance this with your own qualitative judgments of where risk lies.

The goal at the end of this process is to have an understanding of the most prominent cybersecurity threats and the relative impact they can have on the most critical systems.

3.   Calculate the Risk

In a perfect world, determining the ROI of every marginal step, decision, or patch is the gold standard of security.

Walter Haydock, Cybersecurity Expert

Now, the goal should be to categorize the risks based on the relative severity and potential damage. Essentially, this needs to balance:

• Potential impact
• Likelihood of exploitation
• Criticality of the system being targeted

There are several ways to approach this. Ultimately, what you want to achieve here is to get as close as possible to a dollar-by-dollar breakdown of the potential impact of particular vulnerabilities and the cost of remediation.

In practice, this can be difficult to do effectively. Projecting a dollar breakdown of a potential attack is inherently speculative. Some organizations, therefore, prefer to use a more generalized summary of risk.

You can do this by judging the relative risk of vulnerabilities or assets and categorizing them into critical, high, medium, and low. This can still be effective as long as you’ve properly identified the full range of potential vulnerabilities and the most critical systems they could target. You can do this using a likelihood vs. impact matrix or heat map, as shown in this guide from the US Federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

If you prefer a more quantitative assessment, with financial projections, you could try using a framework like FAIR (factor analysis of information risk). Though still speculative, this is an increasingly popular way to quantify potential damage.

[FAIR] avoids the need to deal with bands like high, medium, or low risk. If you have a risk that’s for example, $10m dollars, you can decide whether that’s the boundary between medium or low risk. This avoids confusion by providing an objective view of risk rather than something more subjective.

John Linford, Forum Director, The Open Group Security Forum

4.   Prioritize Risks

In this stage, the priority is to identify and document the most pertinent cybersecurity risks to the organization, based on the risk bands or projected losses you identified in the previous section.

If you’ve gathered all the relevant information, this should be reasonably self-explanatory. Ultimately, the most critical security threats are going to be the highest priority to remediate.

Essentially, you have three options for how to respond to specific threats:

1. Remediate immediately – For the most critical threats. This protects the organization from being attacked through this vector or ensures that a successful attack would be unlikely or ineffective.
2. Deprioritize or mitigate – For more moderate threats, you could implement controls to mitigate any potential damage, or schedule remediation for eg the next scheduled maintenance period.
3. Accept risk – Some low-risk vulnerabilities aren’t worth the time you’d spend protecting against them. Organizations will usually accept some level of risk, but how much depends on the resources you have and the potential damage of an attack.

Whatever the vulnerability or specific solution, the goal in this stage is to create a cost/benefit analysis so you can clearly define the accepted level of risk and best target the resources you have to avoid them.

5.   Document and Repeat

Documenting your findings is perhaps the most crucial stage. This helps distill the details of key threats and critical systems so senior executives and decision-makers can analyze the plan and make strategic decisions. If you have dollar projections, you should add these here as well.

Here’s what the report might include:

• Detailed risk analysis: Describe each identified risk, its source, and potential impact.
• Vulnerabilities assessment: Include information about the vulnerabilities discovered during the assessment process.
• Threat valuation: Assess the value or significance of each threat in terms of its potential impact on the organization.
• Impact and likelihood of occurrence: Evaluate and document the probability of each risk occurring and the potential consequences if it does.
• Control remediations: Suggest appropriate control measures for mitigating identified risks. This should include both short-term fixes and long-term strategies.

Crucially, this should be a continuous, regular process as the nature of specific risks is constantly changing.

6.   Analyze and Implement Security Controls

The final stage involves implementing the recommended fixes from the risk assessment on the most critical assets. Generally, this will be done in collaboration with the C-suite or board, who can be bought in to support the strategic decision-making that the risk assessment is designed to inform.

When it comes to remediation, there are several different options available, including:

• Updating patches
• Installing firewalls, antivirus, or anti-malware
• Encrypting data
• New security policies or best practices
• Adding intrusion detection mechanisms
• Enabling multi-factor authentication
• Segmenting or isolating networks
• Tightening password requirements
• Installing mobile device management (MDM)
• Reviewing access controls to limit exposure of critical systems
• Non-technical policies like physical security or keycard access

The list could go on. Whatever the solution, it’s important to ensure you’re defining potential vulnerabilities broadly – as threats could include anything from a remote ransomware attack to employees having sensitive information on-screen in public places. The solutions you implement need to take into account the full scope of potential risks.

Once you’ve done this, you should have an effective, layered response that is specifically focused on reducing the potential impact an attack can have on your reputation and bottom line.

It’s important to continue doing this process after the document is complete. Repeated risk assessments are the best way to ensure your policies are always up to date.

How Can Heimdal® Help Your Company?

In recent years, automated solutions have emerged as the new industry norm. Manually performing vulnerability assessments and patching is no longer effective because organisations are managing more devices than ever before and vulnerabilities are emerging more quickly than before.

Heimdal®’s Patch & Asset Management software is useful since it is a completely automated patch management solution that can be fully customised to meet the demands of your organisation. It can also execute vulnerability management operations.

With our solution, you will be able to:

• Patch Windows, Linux, macOS, Third-Party, and even proprietary apps, all in one place;
• Generate software and assets inventories;
• Easily achieve compliance with automatically generated detailed reports (GDPR, UK PSN, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, NIST);
• Automatically conduct vulnerability and risk management processes;
• Close vulnerabilities, mitigate exploits, deploy updates both globally and locally, anytime, from anywhere in the world;
• Customize your solution based to perfectly fit the needs of your organization.

Get a customizable, hyper-automated tool, that you govern!

Get Set for a Security Risk Assessment That Actually Delivers

It can be easy to fall into the trap of the metrics mirage – thinking effective cybersecurity risk management is all about applying the right patches, monitoring metrics, installing antivirus, and running frequent vulnerability scans. All of this is important – and an effective strategy isn’t complete without it. But hackers know how to think outside of the box and too many organizations suffer because their hard work and effort aren’t targeted in the right place.

This, ultimately, is why an effective cybersecurity risk assessment is so important. It’s about understanding the full scope of risks your organization is facing, so you’ve got the best possible chance of avoiding a costly attack.

It’s not a quick or easy process, but it’s crucial to diagnose the strength of your overall posture. After all, you can’t protect what you don’t understand.

FAQs: Cybersecurity risk assessment

What is a cybersecurity risk assessment?

A cybersecurity risk assessment is a comprehensive process to identify, categorize, and prioritize vulnerabilities in an organization’s IT infrastructure. It involves analyzing potential cyber threats, assessing how vulnerable the system is, and estimating the potential impact of breaches on the organization’s operations and reputation.

Why is a cybersecurity risk assessment so important?

A cybersecurity risk assessment enables organizations to evaluate information security risks and diagnose the best response. Unlike other processes like a vulnerability assessment – it seeks to understand the full scope of threats and resources available to mitigate them. This makes it one of the most important tools in your cybersecurity arsenal.

How do you conduct cybersecurity risk assessments?

There are six key steps to a cyber risk assessment process:

• Assess potential cyber threats;
• Evaluate the impact and likelihood of these threats;
• Determine risk levels;
• Prioritize risks for remediation;
• Document your findings;
• Implement new fixes and defenses.

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Cristian Neagu

CONTENT EDITOR

Cristian is a Content Editor & Creator at Heimdal®, where he developed a deep understanding of the digital threat landscape. His style resonates with both technical and non-technical readers, proof being in his skill of communicating cybersecurity norms effectively, in an easy-to-understand manner.