Do You Know Your Cyber Risks?

Step #1: Identify Vulnerabilities

Understanding what makes your business attractive to cyber criminals is a valuable exercise, as is determining where your main vulnerabilities lie. Most of the time, ransomware groups are looking to exploit customer data. Think about:

Step #2: Know Your Internal and External Threats

• What kind of information does your organization collect?
• How do you store the data?
• How do you currently protect the data?
• How secure are your IT systems?

Stay on top of the latest ransomware news. One of the best resources is the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Shields Up program. This federal agency provides detailed advisories including the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures used to target organizations.

Internal threats within your organization also are potential triggers. An angry employee could give a ransomware gang access to data, or a staff member deep in debt could steal intellectual property and sell it for personal gain. Unfortunately, these scenarios often only come to light during cyber investigations after the fact.

Step #3: Determine Potential Business Impacts

What happens to your business after a cyberattack? What are the financial and operational consequences? What about your organization’s reputation? Will clients walk away?

If a business continuity plan or resilience plan is in place, you should already have a clear picture of the costs linked to IT failures or business interruption. If not, update your plan to include potential business impacts that could occur after a cyber episode.

Step #4: Prioritize Risk Responses

Once you understand the potential impact of a cyberattack on your business, start to prioritize how to resolve any immediate flaws in your IT security.

Unfortunately, there is no way to completely protect a business from cyber crime; instead you must be prepared for an attack. How strong is your after-an-attack cyber plan? Make sure everyone knows exactly what to do and when. More importantly, your staff must have the skills and resources in place to respond quickly. A highly recommended dry run is called a Tabletop Exercise, which is a simulated disaster (cyber or otherwise) that tests an organization’s plan including the roles and responsibilities of key personnel from the IT staff up to the CEO and beyond, such as public statements and legal involvement if necessary. If you think you don’t have time now to practice a Tabletop run-though, just imagine how you’ll feel when dealing with the real thing.

Recovery Point helps clients with cybersecurity risk mitigation using our proven security framework. We also provide cyberattack recovery solutions (Tier 1/2+, air-gap, and Managed Resiliency).