From innocent but costly mistakes to fraudulent manipulations, all organizations are subject to significant risks that can jeopardize financial reporting or lead to the loss of corporate assets. That’s why it is imperative to establish a robust system of internal controls to reduce or prevent such threats to the organization.

If your organization handles any type of payment processing, storage, or transmission of credit card data electronically, you’ll be very familiar with PCI DSS (formally known as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). This standard exists to protect debit and credit cardholder data from unauthorized access via data breaches, ransomware, and other security breaches. However, with the rise in these breaches also comes the rise in changes and rules to the PCI DSS.

A famous 2011 article by security adviser Roger Grimes is intriguingly titled, “To beat hackers, you have to think like them.” In the article, Grimes explains that IT security professionals must view IT systems through the eyes of hackers — and search ways to break into these systems, identify weaknesses, and create robust security measures. That is exactly what penetration testing is all about.

Every company needs to undertake a certain amount of planning if it wants to grow. This includes not only strategic planning to expand operations and increase profits; executives also need to plan for risks they might encounter so they can anticipate and avoid threats. It makes sense, therefore, to integrate this planning throughout your organization so that no business function goes overlooked.

The phrase “governance, risk, and compliance” (GRC) was first introduced in the early 2000s by the Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG). Since then, the concept has fundamentally changed how businesses operate. Although GRC is not a revolutionary idea by any means, it is integral to assuring that organizations can achieve, and maintain, optimal business continuity.

A supply chain is the ecosystem of processes, systems, and entities that work together to transform an idea into a final product and customer-ready offering. That lifecycle consists of multiple moving parts. As global supply chain complexity increases, organizations in every industry require robust and reliable supply chain management (SCM) tools, processes, and people. Coordination of the supply chain is critical for efficiency and optimization.

With so many threats facing modern companies, it can be difficult to know which threats should be addressed first. Risk quantification is a method that provides you with a numeric representation of your risks, which in turn allows you to prioritize those that are the most likely to happen or could cause the most damage.

The first nine months of 2020 saw 2,953 publicly reported breaches — 51 percent more than the same period in 2019; by the end of 2020, another 1,000 breaches pushed the total to 3,950. On average, security professionals took 228 days to identify a security breach and 80 days to contain it.

If there’s one thing you can expect from cybercriminals, it’s that they’re always looking for new ways to locate and exploit your organization’s vulnerabilities. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines a vulnerability as a “weakness in an information system, system security procedures, internal controls, or implementation that could be exploited or triggered by a threat source.”

It doesn’t matter which industry you work in or how large your business is: every company with a desire to stay competitive and relevant needs a cybersecurity risk management plan. New information technology comes online at a breakneck speed, making our business transactions and processes easier, smoother and faster.

2020 was a landmark year for data breaches. This year will likely be no different. More than 8 billion records were exposed in just the first quarter, a 273 percent jump over the same period from 2019. By the end of Q3 2020, a staggering 36 billion records had been exposed. By end of the year, data breaches had struck high-profile organizations including SolarWinds, Facebook, Microsoft, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Cyberattackers and hackers try to exploit security vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to enterprise networks. Their intentions typically include installing malware, stealing sensitive data, launching supply chain attacks, or engaging in cyber extortion or espionage.

Global cyberattacks increased by 29 percent in the first half of 2021 compared to 2020, and we can assume that cybercriminals and hackers won’t stop their malware and ransomware attacks any time soon. A strong cybersecurity strategy is vital to reduce losses from those attacks, and a robust incident response plan should be a part of that strategy.

All organizations rely on vendors to function in today’s dynamic landscape while achieving peak operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and economies of scale. A growing third-party network can yield significant benefits for organizations — but it also results in greater risk.

According to a Pew survey in 2019, 70 percent of American adults believed at the time that their data was less secure than it had been five years prior. Now consider that a pandemic followed, along with major data breaches at the likes of Microsoft and others. One can safely assume Americans are even less confident about the security of their data today.

Remediation and mitigation are words commonly used interchangeably to describe a wide variety of risk management measures within an organization or project. They are, however, distinct concepts under enterprise risk management (ERM) principles, with particular relevance for safeguarding the organization and its stakeholders. Remediation activities focus on fixing a problem to avoid or prevent the arrival of a risk.

Protecting your business against a cyberattack means diligently monitoring for activity that could indicate an attack is in progress or has already occurred. Locating these pieces of forensic data (such as data found in system log entries or files) ultimately helps you identify potentially malicious activity on your system or network.

Every organization needs strong internal controls to ensure the integrity of financial statements and to promote ethical values and transparency across the enterprise. Internal controls are the mechanism to do those things; controls help to identify risks and then reduce them to an acceptable level.

Cyberattacks can take many forms. Those intended to disrupt a business often happen as denial of service (DoS) attacks, and its even more disruptive cousin, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks are often executed by a botnet, which is a network of infected machines or connected devices at the order of a botmaster. Botnet attacks present yet another challenge for security and IT teams focused on cybersecurity.

The rapid pace of technological progress has let companies around the world benefit from operational improvements that lower costs. This progress, however, also brings risks that companies must take into account to protect their stakeholders. Cyber-threats are executed by cybercriminals using various means to gain access to an organization’s digital infrastructure.

Strong, reliable internal controls are an indispensable element of risk management. Properly functioning controls help to identify risks that could cause suffering, damage, harm, or other losses to your organization. To implement those controls, organizations typically use a control framework to guide their efforts.

No matter how careful you are with your data storage and data protection measures, the risk of data loss is always there. You need to be sure that your company is prepared in the event of cyber attacks or system failures. Hence the need for data backup is so important; a company must have a copy of lost data for swift disaster recovery after a crisis. Too many organizations, however, overlook the possibility that their data backups might also fail.

In a blog post published in February 2021, Microsoft noted that web shell attacks had been steadily increasing since mid-2020. There were 140,000 monthly web shell attacks from August 2020 to January 2021, more than twice the average from 2020. The increasing prevalence of these attacks has a simple reason: web shell attacks are easy to author and launch. So, what are web shell attacks? Why should organizations be more aware of them?

Reciprocity® Risk Intellect is a new risk-analysis tool that, when used with the Reciprocity ZenGRC® platform, provides insight on the impact your compliance programs have on your cyber risk posture. By mapping your current compliance control assessments to cyber risks, it provides immediate context and visibility into which cyber risks and controls offer the greatest opportunity for reducing risk.

Cybercrime can take many forms, and the criminals behind such attacks work with increasing sophistication — even to the point that some companies may, unwittingly, be helping criminals launch attacks against other organizations. For example, botnets are an organized network of infected devices at a hacker’s disposal, which the hacker then uses to carry out cybercrime schemes by harnessing resources available to the bots on the system.

Risk management is the process of identifying, monitoring, and managing potential risks and their negative impacts on a business. These risks can range from data loss, cyberattacks, and security breaches, to system failures and even natural disasters.