What Is Cyber Risk Management?
Cyber risk management is an ongoing process that involves:
- Identifying the assets on your operational network, along with other operational threats and vulnerabilities
- Assessing your vulnerabilities by determining the risk level each asset poses to human life and business viability
- Regularly refining your risk management processes to incorporate new requirements
- Taking steps to close security gaps and increase operational integrity
Why is Cyber Risk Management So Important?
Many of the OT and IoT devices deployed in critical infrastructure and industrial operations weren’t designed with security in mind, yet they are now internet-enabled. Using connected devices expands your cyber attack surface and opens the door to threat actors via unpatched systems, the use of default passwords, lack of two-factor authentication, and other known and unknown device vulnerabilities.
The traditional methods of using proxy firewalls, air gapping, and deep packet inspection to secure and isolate networks are no longer viable in today’s highly automated and digitalized operational environments.
What Are the Steps Involved in Enterprise Risk Management?
Asset Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
Risk assessment and risk management isn’t something an organization can just start and stop. It’s a continual process that begins with asset discovery – gaining visibility into all the OT and IoT assets being used in your operational networks, and then monitoring them continually.
Given that most critical infrastructure and industrial organizations use thousands of OT and IoT devices in their operations, asset inventorying shouldn’t be done manually. Not only would this require a lot of time and resources, devices change continually in any network, so a manually-created list would be out-of-date in no time. Continuous monitoring of your network and automation systems is critical to eliminating blind spots and staying on top of a dynamic operational environment.
Enterprise Risk Assessment
Once you have an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all your assets, the next step involves assessing your risks based on the likelihood that they will be exploited, and the potential impact they might have on the organization. It’s important to identify high risk assets based on factors such as criticality and impact to business. However, in OT environments, it is arguably more important to focus on risk and vulnerabilities that, when exploited, could endanger human safety.
Once you have identified the highest priority vulnerabilities, then it is time to look at the rest. Which ones are high, medium and low priority? What risks, such as old strains of malware, aren’t impacting day-to-day operations? Are you willing to live with them? It won’t be possible to address all identified risks at once, so start with those that have the biggest impact on the business.
Operational Risk Management Processes
When a risk or vulnerability is identified, do you have the processes and resources to respond?
Enterprise risk management playbooks can be used to guide your response, and ensure that risk remediation processes are both repeatable and scalable. They not only speed remediation, they also allow knowledge to be transferred from one person and team to others.
Another important component of operational risk management and risk mitigation involves resourcing. Do you have in-house cyber risk remediation expertise, or do you need 3rd party resources to handle response for you? Resources should be identified and trained before something happens, so they are ready to take action as soon as an incident occurs.
How Nozomi Networks Helps You Apply Cyber Risk Management Across Your Operational Environment
Get Immediate Visibility with Vantage
An enterprise-wide operational security dashboard serves to actively manage security profiles and report on the state of the network. This visibility, security profile assessment, and reporting is designed to meet executive and security communication requirements.
Aggregate Information Across Segments, Networks and Locations
Nozomi Networks Guardian is a passive solution that captures and aggregates device information. It ensures that network status and all connected devices are known, visible and actionable in real-time.
Eliminate Guesswork with Asset & Threat Intelligence, and Anomaly Detection
To maximize responsiveness to important issues, alerts can be prioritized and policies can be configured to automatically trigger enforcement points in the network.
