CYBER RISK ASSESSMENTS
PRIORITIES MATTER
In an age of competing priorities and limited resources, organizations need to identify and prioritize investment in those cyber capabilities that will contribute most to maturing their overall cyber resilience.
Risk assessments are the cornerstone of any successful cyber security strategy. They focus attention on the most important threats and opportunities your organization faces, and lay the groundwork for implementing effective, proportionate, and optimized risk management strategies.
The dynamic nature of cyber risk, requires organizations to continually monitor and reassess their threat exposures to ensure cyber risk levels are understood and managed within defined tolerance thresholds. Only through an ongoing cycle of maintaining and updating your risk assessments can you manage cyber risk proactively, comprehensively, and effectively, without stifling your company’s ability to innovate and execute against its business mission and goals.
In addition to helping you discern the true nature of your organization’s threats and vulnerabilities, and provide you with a clear path forward to enhancing your organization’s overall cyber resilience, STRATIUUM’s Cyber Risk Assessment can:
- Surface gaps and vulnerabilities in your control environment
- Guide future risk mitigation strategies and techniques
- Provide valuable insights into your cyber posture and capabilities
- Set you up to prioritize investments in cyber defenses
THIRD-PARTY CYBER RISK
DO YOU KNOW YOUR WEAKEST LINK?
The Department of Homeland Security recently released an alert warning about active threats targeting managed service providers (MSPs). The number of organizations using MSPs has grown significantly over recent years, according to the alert, which warned that threat actors have been using various tactics and techniques for the purposes of cyber espionage and intellectual property theft since May, 2016.
Cyber adversaries are innovative, organized, and relentless in finding new ways to infiltrate, corrupt and weaponize whatever touches the internet – often bit by bit. An increasingly prevalent strategy is for attackers to divide targets into two groups; the intended targets and potential staging targets – third-party organizations like vendors, suppliers, and industry websites.
Your organization’s risk surface is likely much larger than you think. To accurately and holistically assess cyber risk, you need to consider the threats that lurk below the surface and figure out how a threat actor may try to target your organization through vulnerabilities in your entire ecosystem of vendors, partners, and third-party suppliers.
Third-party relationships can pose a major threat to your company’s reputation, compliance and overall value. Your network isn’t just your network. It’s your network, plus your trusted partners, plus your suppliers. If you are not mitigating risk across the entire ecosystem, you are potentially missing a very large exposure to your business. Now would be a good time to review your cyber risk management program through a third-party lens.
VIRTUAL MARKETS
leaning into crypto
Blockchain is a new technology that combines a number of mathematical, cryptographic, and economic principles in order to maintain a database between multiple participants without the need for any third party validator or reconciliation. In simple terms, it is a secure and distributed ledger.
Because blockchain technology removes an entire layer of overhead dedicated to confirming authenticity, it has many benefits for consumers and businesses alike, reducing costs, speeding up transaction times and providing a more secure method for transferring assets. The list of potential uses is almost limitless including transferring digital or physical assets, protecting intellectual property, verifying the chain of custody, automating contractual agreements, and much more. However, while its potential is transformational, the landscape is nascent and evolving, and there remain several challenges and barriers.
There is certainly growing interest from legislators and regulators in the crypto-asset and blockchain space, including a spate of enforcement activity involving crypto assets. However, in the absence of clear regulatory guidance, navigating the myriad of emerging and evolving developments across the globe is hampering innovation at blockchain companies.
Virtual currency exchanges and other market participants would be well advised to take this time to improve internal security controls, market surveillance protocols, conflicts policies, disclosures, and other investor and consumer protections. Where relevant, applicable regulated securities trading practices and methods can serve as a blueprint.
CRISIS SIMULATIONS
How resilient is your organization?
Every organization has its own ‘perfect storm’ – that combination of incidents or circumstances with the potential to bring the business to its knees.
Amidst the chaos of crises, even seasoned business leaders may be a loss for the right response. However, how you lead, and the strategic actions that you take, in response can make the difference between survival and demise.
Executives, investors, regulators and other stakeholders are keenly aware of the increasingly mercurial threat landscape – everything from weather related events to global cyber attacks. As the world becomes more complex and interconnected, organizations are under great pressure to build the insight, culture, and resilience they need to evolve their crisis response preparedness.
As the world becomes more complex and interconnected, organizations are under great pressure to build the insight, culture, and resilience they need to evolve their crisis response preparedness.
Many are turning to crisis simulations to evaluate different aspects of their response plans, strategies, and processes against the backdrop of today’s new threats, hazards, and challenges.
Simulations yield critical insights into a company’s response capabilities, vulnerabilities, and preparedness. Armed with this information, you can align your crisis management plans with strategic business goals and objectives, creating a stronger, more resilient, and future ready organization.
COMPLIANCE HEALTH CHECK
IS IT TIME FOR A CHECK-UP?
Organizations are subject to increasing amounts of legislative, corporate and regulatory requirements to show they’re managing and protecting their information assets appropriately.
As the threats from cyber criminals and hacktivists grow in scale and sophistication, how can businesses assess the maturity of their risk management mechanisms, against the backdrop of a mercurial security landscape, to reassure employees, customers and stakeholders that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect their information assets and to defend against cyber-attacks?
STRATIUUM’s Compliance Health Check is a high-level evaluation of the key elements of your cybersecurity program, tailored specifically to the capabilities identified in relevant regulatory and legal requirements, specific to your organization.
In addition to providing boards and executives with an independent view of their company’s ability to comply with current and upcoming requirements, STRATIUUM’s Compliance Health Check can:
- Equip you with valuable insights into how you are managing cyber risks
- Help you optimize and prioritize your cybersecurity efforts
- Guide risk mitigation activities and future investments in cybersecurity
- Enhance your leadership team’s awareness of their cybersecurity fiduciary and regulatory obligations
CYBER SIMULATIONS
ARE YOU AFraid of the DARK (WEB)?
The financial losses, regulatory scrutiny, and often irreparable reputational harm inherent in a successful cyber attack, can present a real threat to an organization’s business, and sometimes its very survival.
You need look no further than the seemingly endless string of media reports to recognize that cyber adversaries are relentless in developing new and nefarious ways to attack. While most boards and senior executives accept that the cyber threat is real, perhaps even inevitable, many struggle to orient traditional risk management practices towards enhancing the organization’s overall cyber resilience.
As Regulators retrospectively exact significant penalties from firms for past breaches, and we see an uptick in shareholder derivative actions filed against directors and officers for their alleged breach of fiduciary duties, cyber risk management, strategy, and resilience need to be more prominent topics in the boardroom.
Whether as a short, focused workshop to consider the impact of potential threat scenarios and enhance situational awareness, or as a war game designed to emulate the pressure of a real cyber attack, well orchestrated simulations are a highly effective – and crucially, practical – technique to help business leaders build the insight, culture, and resilience they need to evolve their cyber risk maturity.
emerging technology
Talented people, talented machines
The advances in AI, machine learning, and robotics is astounding. Everything from social and emotional intelligence, natural language processing, logical reasoning, identification of patterns and self-supervised learning, to physical sensors, mobility, navigation and more.
Where a human brain tends to focus on obvious data correlations, a deep-learning algorithm, trained on an ocean of information, has the ability to discover subtle and complex connections between obscure data sets. The uses are nearly limitless, from diagnosing cancer or detecting payment fraud, to autonomous vehicles and robots scurrying about in corporate warehouses.
These technologies are fast, accurate, work around-the-clock without complaining, and can be applied to many tasks and use cases. Breakthroughs in AI, machine learning, and robotics will continue to have monumental impacts on traditional business models and drive widespread economic benefits for all. We urge organizations to rapidly ramp up their efforts to understand and develop a vision for their use of these technologies going forward.
the “internet of things”
outsmarting the smart device
We are experiencing unprecedented growth in connectivity between the digital and physical worlds, where data resides in the cloud, on mobile technology and devices connected to the “Internet of Things” (IoT). While the opportunities are fascinating, cyber security is the leading challenge when it comes to the adoption of IoT technology because insecure interfaces increase the risk of unauthorized access.
Cyber adversaries are innovative, organized, and relentless in finding new ways to infiltrate, corrupt and weaponize whatever touches the internet – often bit by bit. Rather than simply going straight after the larger, and often better protected, intended target, adversaries worm their way into that organization’s supply chain, using smaller, less secure trusted partners and suppliers to gather intelligence and set traps.
While a largely regulation-free tech industry may soon be a thing of the past, for now, in a world which lets anyone build and share new code and services, with consequences to be dealt with later, security concerns over those seemingly innocuous devices should not be overlooked.
emerging technology
digital becomes mainstream
Data is everywhere. Hyper connectivity, coupled with digitization, is compelling organizations to adapt traditional business models to incorporate broader and multi-source data sets.
Beyond computers and smart devices that record and communicate, everything from cars to coffee machines are becoming rich sources of information, and will reshape the competitive landscape between companies who use data to their advantage and those who do not.
Given the proliferation of data, we encourage executives to explore how to get the most value out of the information they collect and hold. When used properly, data analytics can help companies understand their customers better than ever before, anticipate risks with far greater precision, and identify opportunities to improve performance as competitive dynamics evolve.