An effective information security management system (ISMS) provides a structured framework of policies and procedures. This ensures an organization’s data is secure, including the people, processes and technology that hold it.
Cybercriminals are growing more sophisticated and more numerous, while companies and organizations are seeking better ways to protect their systems from attack. One way is through a cyber security management system assessment.
1. Risk Assessment
Practically every organization has information that is vulnerable to cyber attacks. This assessment focuses on those specific risks, so it doesn’t include the risk of fire or flooding that would typically be part of a general risk assessment.
Identify your assets to determine the scope of the assessment. Consider factors like identifying what the information is that you are trying to protect, its value and how critical it is to business operations.
Ideally, you want to have a dedicated team handling your cyber risk assessment. This will involve IT staff that understands your network and digital infrastructure, executives who know how the information flows in your company, and any proprietary information your company may have. It is also helpful to have cybersecurity software that will allow you to monitor your cyber risk score, prevent breaches and reduce third-party risk.
2. Security Policy
Defining security policies that are both comprehensive and easy to follow is a challenging balancing act. They must be tailored to the company’s unique needs and flexible enough to adapt as new technologies emerge. Security policies protect the corporate from theft, fraud, unauthorized disclosure and modification of information and assets. They also help mitigate threats such as unauthorized access, sabotage, vandalism, natural disasters and technical failures.
Examples of security policies include acceptable use policies that spell out rules for employee usage of the company’s assets, remote access policies that describe how and when employees can work from home or other locations and data encryption policy that describes how and where data will be stored. A good security program also has change management and incident response policies that define procedures for handling cyber attacks and data breaches.
3. Monitoring
Like many aspects of running a business, cyber security requires systems and processes. A cyber security management system helps define these to improve your organisation’s information security.
Continuous monitoring helps your organisation stay ahead of attackers and prepare for potential threats. It also helps with resource allocation as it makes it easier to identify critical systems and prioritize security monitoring for them.
The right tools can help to make monitoring easier by centralizing and normalizing log data, providing alert and correlation customization and investigation workflows. They can also use threat intelligence to add context to events and prioritize them based on their relevance to your environment. This allows you to focus on the important things and improves your speed to respond when a threat is detected.
4. Training
Just as your business has systems for customer service, credit control and ordering goods, it should also have a cyber security management system in place. This enables the business to keep all its assets and data safe from cybercriminals.
Employee training is an important part of a cyber security management system. It educates employees on how to identify phishing attacks and other common hacking tactics that can be used to steal sensitive information or intellectual property.
Security awareness programs should be based on best practices and designed to fit into an organization’s culture. They should also be flexible, allowing them to be launched in response to end users’ poor cybersecurity behavior. This approach is known as “just-in-time” or in-context training, and helps to reduce cyber incidents.
5. Incident Response
Having procedures in place ensures that your team can react quickly to a security incident. These procedures can also help to prevent damage, and get business operations back online.
During the identification phase, teams work to detect and investigate the nature of the breach. This includes identifying the attack, its source, and the attacker’s goals. It’s important that the team keeps detailed notes during this phase to aid in future prevention activities.
Once the identification process is complete, it’s time to contain the attack and remove any malware from systems. This can include removing infected devices from the network, and bringing updated replacement systems online. This step requires the help of an incident response (IR) tool such as Cynet.