Today’s article is brought to you by guest blogger, Scott Templin, Cyber Risk Advisor with Lachesis, LLC.

Is your business prepared for a cyberattack?

Business leaders are forced to face this uncomfortable question even when they do not have a technical background. Six trillion dollars is the estimated cost of cyberattacks in 2021. Not having a plan is simply not an option.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

The key issue when it comes to evaluating the risk your business faces when it comes to cybersecurity is a lack of understanding of where your vulnerabilities lie.

A cyber risk profile helps businesses identify and analyze their cyber risks and vulnerabilities by measuring their current cyber resilience.

According to Cisco’s Cybersecurity Report in 2019, businesses with over 10,000 employees on average spend over $1 million a year on cybersecurity. This budget is simply not attainable for most businesses out there, though their risk must still be mitigated. To validate each dollar spent on overall security, the first step is learning what you don’t know.

I have heard it dozens of times.

“Scott, I hear what you are saying, but my IT guy says we’re good.”

If only cybersecurity were that easy.

If only we could decide between being secure or not secure, like a true-or-false question on a quiz. Yet companies such as Adobe, eBay, Equifax, LinkedIn, Marriott, and Yahoo all saw cybersecurity breaches in the past 10 years. All of which were likely investing heavily into their security.

Would they say they were “good”?

Assessing Your Cyber Risk Profile in 5 Steps

At Lachesis, we have found the best way to assess your profile is a 12-month holistic program that provides a comprehensive cybersecurity assessment.

By launching a simulated attack on your system, we can find vulnerabilities that may be present and exploitable without causing any damage.

Our 5-step process provides a clearer picture of your overall cyber risk profile.

Step 1: Business Cost Analysis

Cybersecurity is a business concern requiring a collaboration between leadership, operations, relevant specialists, and IT departments. By starting with some basic questions regarding your profit generation, risk exposure to goodwill, insurance coverage, and hard costs associated with breaches, we can start to see the kind of business impact that could occur when something goes wrong.

Step 2: Vulnerability Analysis

An outside vulnerability assessment is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to visibility into how secure your business is. It is also important to review policies and procedures when it comes to data backups or how each employee is handling personal information.

Step 3: Prioritization

There are many companies out there that will do an offensive attack on your system to see where your vulnerabilities lie. The key difference between us and them is that by combining that vulnerability analysis with a business cost analysis, we are able to prioritize and even assign a potential dollar value to each threat. Now a business leader with no tech background has the ability to clearly see not only the probability of a threat. They will also have a better understanding of the cost that could be associated with such an attack.

Step 4: The Action Plan

You have learned about the threat and the cost. Now it is time to put things in place. This could be as simple as updating some software, or it could be a deeper look into how your business handles its data backups.

Step 5: Continuous Monitoring

By constantly screening for new vulnerabilities, you can determine whether the updated security measures implemented are effective. A one-time snapshot of your business from months ago will need to be updated as new threats arise and businesses change and grow.

Disaster Recovery Plan

Does your business’s current disaster recovery plan include steps to take in the event of a cyber disaster such as data loss, hacking, or other similar disruption?

By performing a full cybersecurity assessment now, you can have a plan in place the same way you would in the event of a building fire or the loss of key personnel.

When you start to make changes now to the way you view and focus on your cybersecurity, you can put together a strategic technology plan that will allow you to feel a true peace of mind.

Remember, you do not have to do this alone.

Feel free to contact me directly to start finding out what you do not know and how together we can better understand your business’s cyber risk profile.