Today’s digital landscape is full of cyber criminals looking to take advantage of weak security measures. Conducting a cyber security risk assessment can help you protect your digital assets by mitigating the top threats to your business. Here are three main reasons why cyber assessments are a necessity.
1. Threat types
There are countless types of cyber threats. A firewall is no longer enough to prevent malicious intruders. Attacks include social engineering, phishing, malware, distributed denial of service (DDoS), ransomware, and more. How do you know what you need to protect yourself from?
A cyber security risk assessment enables you to determine which threat types you are vulnerable to, so you can take action to protect yourself against them.
2. Threat severity
Depending on what attack has penetrated your cyber defenses, the costs can range from irritating to catastrophic. The median cost of a successful cyber attack is $18,000 in 2022, and nearly half of cyber incidents result in costs of over $25,000.
Manageable? Not for most businesses that don’t have that kind of cash flow. However, a data breach is much worse. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) lose an average of $108,000 in the case of a successful data breach. Enterprises lose millions.
Where does a business begin with protecting itself from potential data breaches? If you have digital assets, such as patent information, sensitive customer data, and other assets that are digitally stored, you need a cyber risk assessment to bolster your cyber security posture.
3. Threat prevalence
Since the pandemic, there has been a huge surge in cyber attacks, as noted in the FBI’s Internet Crime Report. Cyber criminals are casting wide nets in hopes of catching businesses that are vulnerable, and many are unable to deal with the attacks. Small businesses and large enterprises and everything in between are all targets of cyber attacks. A cyber assessment helps you determine where your weaknesses are so that you can significantly reduce the number of successful attacks.
What does a cyber risk assessment do?
Now that you know the top three reasons cyber assessments are a necessity, it’s time to go over what the assessment entails.
Evaluation
The first step to a baseline cyber risk assessment is evaluating the strength of your cyber security posture. Your security is judged based on factors such as whether you update your software, have password authentication security, and more.
Identify areas of improvement
The cyber security assessment will allow you to see where there are security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. This enables your organization to more effectively and easily create a cyber security action plan.
Take action
Finally, the risk assessment report will give your company recommendations on what to do next. This will vary depending on your specific needs, goals, and budget.
Strengthen your cyber security today
Trava has a free cyber risk assessment tool here. Our expert team also conducts baseline cyber risk assessment (BCRA) for customers to further strengthen their cyber security posture.
