Cybersecurity assessments are crucial in strengthening your company’s cyber defense. You must include these cybersecurity questions in your assessments.
Before starting the assessment, stakeholders must establish what weaknesses they’re looking for and how they will test for them. Of course, assessment is just the beginning of strengthening your cybersecurity. You must develop a solid plan to address any issues that will come up in the assessment. Otherwise, problems may linger or even become worse.
The key to a successful assessment is to ask the right cybersecurity questions before and after the process. This will ensure that your business will find and effectively address any vulnerabilities. Listed below are some insights from cybersecurity experts on what cybersecurity questions you must include in a cybersecurity assessment.
Are we only focused on compliance?
Most companies implement security measures just for the sake of compliance. However, relying solely on regulatory compliance often gives a false sense of security. Thus, businesses must have cyber risk management as their main motive and make it a part of a broader business context.
Is our staff prepared for a cyberattack?
You can’t just give your employees some documents and say, “Read this.” Your company must have a training program that will walk them through the steps on what to do in case of an emergency. This will increase your team’s security awareness and response in a real crisis.
What would a hacker do?
It is crucial that you also view the assessment from a hacker’s perspective. Include on your cybersecurity questions: “what would a hacker do, and what will be our response?” Following this tip will make your assessment more comprehensive.
Furthermore, organizations must ask themselves how many different ways a hacker could access critical assets. Moreover, make sure that your existing security controls have been tested to detect and respond to the threat effectively. This question will ensure that the company clearly understands its security posture. Also, it enables them to properly defend their most critical assets.
What level of risk do we want to live with?
It is nearly impossible to mitigate all risks that your company faces. Attempting to eliminate all risks will result in unnecessary spending of resources. Thus, you must figure out how much risk exposure you’re willing to deal with.
What level of security do we need?
Cybersecurity requires every organization to invest. We also need to consider the cost of investing in cybersecurity. The last thing we need is to under protect or overprotect data.
Every organization has varying needs so the level of security varies, too. The volume of data you manage, the products you sell, and the value of the intellectual property will decide the level of security you need. Afterward, you may turn to frameworks such as NIST to identify the necessary controls.
How will we recover from a hack?
Data breaches are inevitable. The time will come that you will face an outage. How will you respond to the incident? Keep in mind that assessments are for identifying vulnerabilities, not to show how secure you are.
