What are Cybersecurity Risks, Types and Solutions?

When you think of a cybersecurity risk, you probably think of things like data breach, malware, phishing, etc.

These are threats to your business, but the risk itself is the consequences of these threats to your business. The risk isn’t being attacked. The risk is losing your customer’s private data or worse, going out of business.

Understanding these risks helps you to make informed decisions to better protect your company from attack.

In this glossary post, we will cover:

• The different types of cybersecurity risk
• How these risks can impact your company
• What you can do to reduce these risks

Risks Come in Different Shapes and Sizes

There are different types of risk you need to consider.

Time and Resources

An attack could cost you time in several ways. You might have to shut down for days, weeks, or even months. You’ll also need to dedicate resources to investigating and remediating the incident.

For example, the National Bank of Pakistan suffered a destructive cyberattack on October 29, 2021. The attack impacted some of its services, including the bank’s ATMs, internal network, and mobile apps. In response, they had to invest a significant amount of time investigating the issue, taxing resources and putting business on hold.

Financial

The financial costs of dealing with a cyberattack span hiring contractors to fix the issue, buying software, paying fines, etc.

In 2017, the global shipping company, Maersk, was a victim of a ‘NotPetya’ attack. The attack caused an estimated $300 million in damages, including lost revenue and the cost of IT recovery. Maersk had to replace thousands of servers, computers, and network equipment. It took weeks to restore its IT systems.

Operational

An attack will change the way you do business. The systems and processes will likely need to change, and maybe even the hierarchy.

Target was the victim of a data breach in 2013. The breach affected approximately 40 million credit and debit card accounts, leading to significant short-term and long-term consequences. The company had to allocate resources towards preventing, detecting, and resolving cyber breaches, and senior management showed extremely high concern for cybersecurity incidents.

Reputational

Trust is a huge part of the relationship with your customers. Experiencing a breach can seriously affect customers’ trust and can cause extensive damage to your reputation at the same time.

For example, when British Airways experienced a data breach it was highlighted as one of the reasons for its reputation falling to a four-year low in 2019. Even after the direct financial costs of the cyber incident were resolved, the ensuing reputational damage continued for many years.

Legal

Your company has a legal responsibility to protect your customers. This might come in the form of GDPR, HIPAA, or any other law or regulation. Fines have been known to get as high as $1.2 billion

Equifax experienced a data breach in 2017 that exposed the personal information of over 147 million people. The breach resulted in a settlement of $700 million with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 U.S. states and territories.

Big and Important, Inc., a Case Study

These risks to your business don’t exist in isolation. Everything is interconnected, and when something is a risk to one thing, it’s likely a risk to everything else.

To understand how this looks, let’s take a look at the very fictional case study of Big and Important, Inc.

It was the summer of 2022, and everything was going great for Big and Important Inc. The C-suite was having its annual in Mauritius, then the warning signs came.

There’s been a breach…

Millions of customer records had been stolen via an API, and the attacker has threatened to leak them online.

The CEO immediately asks for a risk report to get a clear picture of what this breach means to the company.

The Risk Report

Operational

The affected API needs to be locked down while the breach is investigated. This will effectively grind the whole business to a halt, as most of the systems rely on this API. Any short-term plans will need to be shelved while the company deals with this issue. And long-term plans will need to be re-evaluated once the company understands the full damage of the breach.

Time and Resources

The attack will need to be investigated and remedied. This will take up the time of internal specialists and might require external contractors. The customer support teams will be spending their time processing and dealing with complaints about the breach and the loss of service. The legal team will have their hands full dealing with the inevitable regulatory and legal issues.

Every department in the company will have to divert their effort to deal with the aftermath of this breach

Legal

The company will likely now face fines from regulatory bodies and their regulations for non-compliance. This will include the SEC, GDPR, and HIPAA. There is also the risk of lawsuits from individuals affected by the breach, whether standalone cases or class-action lawsuits.

Reputational

This incident has a significant impact on the company’s reputation. Not only is trust heavily damaged by the loss of customer data. But the lack of service during the incident also tells customers that the company isn’t reliable.

Financial

Everything above ultimately compounds the financial risk. It will need to halt business while the investigation proceeds, causing loss of revenue, while diverting resources and hiring external contractors. If the company is found to be in breach of regulations, fines may be incurred. And the hit to the company’s reputation will have a long-lasting effect on revenue.

Solution

The best way to mitigate risks is to be prepared for any cybersecurity attack. It’s a matter of when not if, which is why you need to be proactive.

Step 1 – Understand and Prioritize your Risks

You need to understand your company’s attack surface before you can do anything. The best way to do this is by taking inventory of your assets. Once you’ve done this, you can prioritize based on how much risk there is against each asset.

Anything critical to the business operation would be considered the highest priority. Often this can be measured by putting a dollar value on it. For example, if something could cost you $1,000, it won’t be as high a priority as something that could cost you $1 million.

Step 2 – Have a Plan (and Test it!)

Once you know what your priorities are, you then need to have a solid incident response plan and policy in place. For example, if critical database X gets destroyed, how are you going to recover it? Is there a backup? Is that backup in a different region? How easy is it to transition to this backup?

Your incident response plan also needs to outline roles and responsibilities and must be approved by senior leadership. To identify any gaps in your plan, you’ll want to run: tabletop exercises, walkthroughs, attack simulations, and get third-party assessments.

Preventative Measures

There is no silver bullet tool in cybersecurity that will solve all your problems. Once you’ve got a clear idea of your assets and where the risks are, you can then find the right toolset for your company.

You want to find things that make it as quick as possible to go from zero information to a full report. Identify what processes can be delegated or automated.

Common preventative measures include:

• Staff training
• MFA
• WAF
• API protection
• Code scanning
• Man pen tests
• Zero-day attack protection

Review

This process is not a one-and-done. You need to constantly review and repeat this process to ensure you’re mitigating known and new risks. It is a standard to review the plan annually, but really it should be more often than that. By consistently reviewing your security posture and assets, developing a risk and remediation plan, and reviewing that plan on a regular basis, you can go a long way to preventing the worst-case scenarios from cyberthreats.

Need help securing your APIs and applications? Request a free demo to see how ThreatX by A10 Networks can help you.