A cyber security risk assessment is about understanding, managing, controlling and mitigating cyber risk across your organization. It is a crucial part of any organization's risk management strategy and data protection efforts. Risk assessments are nothing new and whether you like it or not, if you work in information security, you are in the risk management business.
Creating and maintaining relationships with third parties brings about multiple risks. Whether your organization is large or small, it’s almost certain that you have business relationships with many third parties for specific types of operations. When operational data and confidential information are exchanged with third parties, that data and information are vulnerable to misuse and exploitation. This is where risk comes into the equation.
Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) deals with more than protecting an organization from cyber-attacks on third parties. It also addresses third parties to those third parties (known as “fourth parties”). Further still, a vendor to your vendor’s vendor is a fifth party, then a sixth party, etc. Your SCRM should involve knowledge of how far, complex and even convoluted your supply chain is. Then measure this complexity with your risk appetite.
This blog was written by a third party author. A security risk assessment is a formal method for evaluating an organization's cybersecurity risk posture. Comprehensive security risk assessments take stock in business objectives, existing security controls, and the risk environment in which the business operates. When done well, the assessment identifies security gaps in existing controls as compared with industry best practices.
There is a story from years ago about a warehouse network of computers that was separated from the main network. Those machines were running older OSes. But since they weren’t connected to the company network, didn’t hold company data, and only ran the warehouse machines, they were deemed secure. One day, the sysadmin noticed that all of those computers had a glitch at the same time. He remotely rebooted and went back to his desk. But they all glitched again. What happened?
