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Cybersecurity is the top concern for businesses worldwide; therefore, security measures are being updated to address the changing cyber threats, such as the increasing DDOS attacks, which are predicted to increase to 15.4 million by 2023.
Creating a proper strategy for measuring and communicating security metrics is crucial in these circumstances. Quantifying cyber risks from a financial aspect enables making well-informed, data-driven decisions. Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) makes it easier to understand the vulnerabilities in complying with cyber security standards and gets both cybersecurity professionals and C-suite executives on the same page.
Companies can quickly assess cyber risk by evaluating the value change of future revenues or market share in the event of a cyber-attack. This article will thoroughly introduce cyber risk quantification, and how it can benefit businesses simply and clearly.
Categorizing and quantifying cyber risks through Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) is one effective solution, and this article details the concept, the fundamental data required, and its main advantages.
What is Cyber Risk Quantification?
The process of evaluating cyber risks on various scales and assessing the potential financial loss by cyberattacks is known as CRQ:
- It enables businesses and cybersecurity experts to prioritize which risks and vulnerabilities to fix first
- It provides the base to make knowledgeable decisions and allocate budgets based on mitigation strategies for the best cyber protection and ROI.
- It results in greater alignment between cyber risk prevention programs and business objectives
Required Data for Cyber Risk Quantification
Sophisticated modeling methods, such as Monte Carlo simulations, are used for cyber risk quantification; the cornerstone of the whole process is data, which can be gathered from three main sources:
Cybersecurity Resilience
A full assessment of the company’s cybersecurity strategy will help find its vulnerabilities and missing security controls; the next step is listing and documenting potential risks, which serves as the foundation for further analysis.
Frequency
Listing cyber risks is not enough; experts must determine how frequently they occur, analyze the history of previous attacks, and keep an eye on global cyber attacks targeting the same industry. This analysis will keep security protocols up-to-date, and it’s important because something that happens rarely can quickly become common.
Severity
Cyber security risks aren’t all the same in severity, so to get a more accurate evaluation of their financial loss, their vulnerability must be quantified depending on how much data can be affected and its associated costs.
Top Benefits of Cyber Risk Quantification
1. Determine Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities
As a base data source for CROs, identifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities is a great advantage. Vulnerabilities include any weaknesses that cyber criminals can use to penetrate the company’s system or network, ranging from simple problems like poor passwords to more complex issues. With this kind of identification and assessment, each risk’s likelihood will be figured out and dealt with accordingly, improving the company’s cybersecurity in general.
2. Decide About Meeting Compliance Regulations
Most companies are subjected to cybersecurity compliance and regulatory requirements depending on the data they store and the industry. With cyber risk quantification, CROs can evaluate the current situation against cybersecurity compliance regulations and highlight potential threats, thus avoiding unwanted consequences.
3. Produce and Maintain Proper Documentation
Security documentation tracks the company’s quantitative progress regularly. Consistent tracking demonstrates how strategically the company’s cyber security plans are being developed, what needs to be improved in the short and long terms, and what issues have been addressed successfully. Additionally, it proves that the company is taking cyber risks seriously and investing in cyber security, making it stand out to investors and potential clients.
4. Improve Communication
The everlasting struggle is the communication between cybersecurity professionals and C-suite executives, and utilizing CRQ resolves the whole issue, as both sides will come to a common ground.
CRQ replaces the complicated technical terms with a simplified description of the risks, such as “high,” “medium, and “low,” so the company’s management can prioritize the risks easily and make quick data-informed decisions.
5. Gain Insight into The Company’s Ability to Mitigate Security Threats
Cyber risk quantification highlights vulnerabilities and identifies threats capable of damaging the company’s digital assets; those threats are not only caused by cyber attacks but also include many other factors like natural disasters such as floods or fires. Companies can consider all threats to keep their data safe with such a thorough assessment.
Cyber Risk Quantification for C-suite Executives
One of the main reasons Humanize developed Salience was to provide cyber security quantification and present it to C-suite executives. In addition to identifying potential risks, the platform calculates the associated financial loss and makes recommendations corresponding to compliance standards.
The main goal was to simplify data-driven decision-making for non-cybersecurity professionals by quantifying potential cyber risks and presenting the information understandably and accompanied by financial impact estimations.
Conclusion
Cyber threats aren’t going anywhere; they will continue to grow and become more aggressive, and companies need to be ready to handle them effectively. Cyber risk quantification is a powerful process that utilizes risk profiling and its financial implications to measure the risk reduction costs and potential financial loss due to cyber attacks. As a result, it helps companies optimize their investments in cyber risk prevention.
