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Cybersecurity Risk Management: Is It Time for an Audit?

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Cyberattacks have been gaining momentum lately, highlighting the need for strong security measures to safeguard your critical information. In 2020, 3 in 10 Canadian organizations were victims of cybercrime, of which 25% experienced a breach of customer or employee data. Another 38% were not even aware that a breach had occurred. What’s more concerning is that only 36% of organizations experiencing a cybercrime are likely to report it to a regulatory body. 

Cybercrime can cost businesses in trillions, which is why many audit committees and boards are now focusing on setting expectations for internal audits to understand and assess how an organization can manage its cybersecurity risks.

For years, Packetlabs has been helping businesses with cybersecurity risk management to deal with cybercrimes effectively. From our vast experience, we can say that the first step towards building an efficient internal audit process is to conduct a cybersecurity maturity assessment that helps you distill the findings into a summary for the audit committee and board. The summary helps the board in creating a risk-based, multi-year cybersecurity internal audit plan for your organization. To understand if it’s the right time to conduct an internal audit, you need to understand the why and how of cybersecurity risk management. 

The Why and How of Cyber-Risk Assessment 

To explore your organization’s cyber risks, you need to find answers to three key questions:

Who might attack? 

Identify if the perpetrators are cybercriminals, your competitors, third-party vendors hired to harm your organization, disgruntled insiders, some agenda-driven hackers or some other suspects.

What are they after?

Focus on what business risks you should mitigate. Do the attackers want money or intellectual property? Are they trying to disrupt your business or ruin your reputation? Do they pose health and safety risks?

What tactics might they use? 

Will they take you down through phishing or stolen credentials? Will they probe system vulnerabilities or enter your networks through a compromised third party?

How to Handle the Threats

By examining the questions we just discussed, Packetlabs has identified a strategic approach for cybersecurity risk management to help clients like you address the threats identified. 

By Establishing Security 

Most organizations have various controls to protect their data against potential and known cyber threats, such as perimeter defences, identity management and data protection. Our risk-focused program helps you prioritize controls that align with top business risks.

By Being Vigilant

We provide you with threat intelligence, security monitoring, and behavioural and risk analysis to detect malicious or unauthorized activities, for instance, application configuration changes or unusual data movement. So, we help your organization respond in real-time to the changing threat landscape.

By Bringing Resilience

Packetlabs helps you become resilient by establishing incident response protocols, forensics, and business continuity and disaster recovery plans to recover quickly, reducing the effect of a security breach.

Role of Internal Audits in Cybersecurity Risk Management

Many internal audit functions, like attack and penetration procedures, focus on evaluating the various components of an organization’s cyber security readiness. These targeted audits are valuable, but they do not provide security against all types of cyber security risks. 

Internal audits need a broader approach to avoid providing a false sense of security by only performing targeted audits; they must offer a comprehensive view of cybersecurity. Cyber risks are growing in frequency and variety. The damage they can cause to your company, trading partners and customers should not be underestimated. Most businesses take these risks seriously, but it requires even more effort to combat the dangers and keep company leaders apprised of cybersecurity preparedness. 

By providing your organization with an independent assessment of existing and needed controls, internal audits can play a critical role in helping your organization in the ongoing battle of mitigating cyber threats. Also, an internal audit or cybersecurity maturity assessment can help the audit committee and board understand all the digital world risks, allowing them to address them before it is too late. 

Packetlabs helps you build a multi-year internal audit plan using the results of the cybersecurity maturity assessment. Based on the overall threat scenario and other testing activities underway in your organization, you can prioritize and conduct audits in a way that makes sense to your goals and overall cybersecurity strategy. 

Endnote

Contact us today to discuss the role of an internal audit or cybersecurity maturity assessment in cybersecurity and how Packetlabs is helping organizations safeguard their information while meeting the expectations of their board committees. Packetlabs offers comprehensive services for internal audits, ensuring cybersecurity risk management with complete transparency.