While cybersecurity might be under the umbrella of IT, make no mistake: a breach will impact the entire business, making it the entire organization’s responsibility to be able to understand and take action on risk. This means that your organization needs to have a holistic view of risk that can enable the risk intelligence required to not only have technical discussions, but business conversations about cyber risk.

The cybersecurity landscape is complex enough without the lack of a common vocabulary. But, often, organizations use common security terms incorrectly or interchangeably. This leads to confusion, which leads to frustration, which can lead to something much, much worse. Something like a breach. Let’s take a moment, then, to review the four most commonly mixed-up and misused security terms in the cybersecurity world.

Protecting your organization against security incidents is easy enough in theory, but many businesses struggle to find the right approach when it comes to their cybersecurity. As the digital transformation takes hold of the modern business environment, implementing safeguards to your organization’s critical information is only going to become more critical for survival-and if you aren’t doing so already, it’s time for your organization to take proactive protective measures.

Most organizations have at least one thing in common: every year, they’re generating and consuming more and more data. Dealing with all this data can be overwhelming, and especially so for those organizations that haven’t fully embraced the digital transformation and the cultural shifts that come along with it. As your data grows, so too does the risk that your data will be exposed to unauthorized parties in a security incident called a data breach or a data leak.

Earlier this month, the United Nations (U.N.) released its latest Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR2022). For those of us who assess risk for a living, it is a sobering read.

For many years and across industries, enterprise risk management (ERM) has always been an important part of any successful business operation. Organizations of all types and sizes face a number of external and internal factors that make it uncertain whether they will achieve their goals; ERM can bring that uncertainty to lower levels. Understanding the risks to your organization can help you make better decisions about how to reduce those risks; that’s where risk management comes in.

Running penetration tests of a mature web application is always a great challenge. Systems are usually well hardened, and scanners fall short of flagging anything interesting, requiring an experienced security engineer to identify vulnerabilities using advanced exploitation methods. On the other side, some applications are going for their first release ever or release after a major code change.

The supply chain for organizations has become increasingly susceptible to unplanned cybersecurity interruptions that negatively impact revenue, inventory, and consumer confidence. As a result, there has been an increasing focus on understanding how critical services are delivered, the reliance on third parties and fourth parties, and key risk controls that can be implemented to mitigate the risk of cyber security incidents.

If you’re selling to the federal government, you need to take a closer look at your supply chain risk management process. The software supply chain is, as most of us know by now, both a blessing and a curse.

Most cyber insurance policies include a form of value-added service meant to help policyholders avoid cyber incidents. These services create differentiation in the market for insurers and help the bottom line. In fact, a recent survey of cyber insurers found that risk engineering services are a bigger driver of profitability than underwriting accuracy. Yet, we know that the dynamic nature of cyber risk has insurers struggling to keep up and new approaches to evaluating that risk are needed.