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Cybersecurity

Security Posture: Definition and Assessments

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For most companies, determining acceptable levels of risk is a subjective exercise. The decision typically rests on the ethos of senior leadership: Are they growth-oriented risk-takers, or more conservative and measured in their actions?

Other factors influencing risk include your company’s reputation in an industry. For example, if you’re known for being astute in the processing and storing of personal data for customers, your security posture will likely be more thorough, compared to a small company that’s trying out new tactics for optimizing cloud services.

The bottom line is your company’s cybersecurity risk posture is highly dependent on your company’s overall risk culture.

What Is Cyber Posture?

Cyber posture, also called security posture, is the security status of all software, networks, services, and information in your organization’s possession. Your cyber posture encompasses all controls and procedures that protect your company from attacks, your organization’s ability to defend against attacks underway, and your ability to react or recover from any data breaches.

This posture covers all network components, users, and any stored data that could be compromised. It entails assessing the effectiveness of current security methods and software in repelling threats.

To determine the effectiveness of your cybersecurity posture, you must first conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment; this will determine your degree of exposure across multiple assets inside the organization. Identifying your risks and possible vulnerabilities helps the executive team to decide which control activities should be performed first because those steps will have the most effect on improving your cybersecurity posture. As your cybersecurity posture improves, your cybersecurity risk should decline.

How to Strengthen Your Cyber Security Posture

Because hackers move so quickly, an organization’s cybersecurity activities should never cease. Focus on the following areas when establishing a solid cybersecurity posture.

Establish a Cybersecurity Team

Consider forming a specialized cyber team to monitor the organization’s cybersecurity posture. They will be able to prevent possible events and assure that your organization’s security efforts are commensurate with its risks.

A strong team can also dedicate more time to general maintenance, assuring that everyone is pleased on all fronts and that both employees and senior management understand cybersecurity regulations and why security is vital to the organization.

Monitory Your Posture Regularly

Because the cybersecurity industry moves quickly and new standards emerge constantly, you must check your organization’s cybersecurity posture at regular intervals (say, once a year). This helps you to prevent emerging cyber threats and breaches from becoming a significant problem.

Develop a Robust Cybersecurity Culture

If you foster a solid security culture inside your organization, you will reduce risk from the start and be able to avoid future mistakes and catastrophes. Employees who understand the security environment are less vulnerable to phishing attempts and are aware of standard practices such as frequently upgrading devices and applications.

Adhere to a Cybersecurity Framework

Cybersecurity frameworks help companies to adopt and follow a consistent approach for security. Different sectors have different frameworks, based on their particular demands for compliance and data protection. In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published numerous widely used security frameworks.

Prepare for Attacks

Every company should be ready for a cyber attack, so develop an incident response plan that can guide employees through what they should do if an attack happens. Responding swiftly to a cyber assault may help you prevent downtime, defend your reputation, and save money.

How Do You Assess Risk Posture?

The first step in assessing risk posture is a vulnerability assessment to uncover any gaps in your cybersecurity system. It’s best to use an external auditor or security consultant to review your current IT ecosystem to identify security issues.
Your vulnerability assessment report should include recommendations to fix any gaps in your system and provide information about current business processes that weaknesses in your IT system might affect.

Next, conduct penetration testing after remediating any cybersecurity gaps found during the assessment. Penetration testing is a great way to gauge your company’s preparedness for attacks (it tests all the measures you put in place to seal up the vulnerabilities found in the previous step) and can help your team understand how well your system responds to data breaches or phishing attempts.

How to Improve Security Posture

If you don’t already have one established in your organization, start by creating a risk management team. Your team should include leaders from all departments and include the following: a chief information security officer, privacy officer, compliance officer, marketing representative, product management officer, and a human resources specialist.

Once your risk management team is assembled, catalog your business assets, including infrastructure and any services your company provides. Be sure to include third-party vendors in your asset list, because they pose one of the most significant risks to your company’s information security.

Next, perform a cybersecurity risk assessment on those assets. Consider risks to systems, networks, and software that are critical to your business operations, and determine sensitive information that requires availability, confidentiality, and integrity maintained. This process is crucial and will help your team analyze each identified risk and assess the probability and impact of each security threat.
After completing your risk assessment, implement security controls, including network segregation, encryption, anti-malware, anti-ransomware software, firewall configuration, and multi-factor authentication. Other security controls include password protocols, workforce security awareness training, and developing a vendor risk management program.

Finally, create ongoing monitoring and review incident response protocols to help round out your risk management program and elevate your cybersecurity posture. With cyberattacks an ever-present risk, your organization should aim to monitor continuously in real-time for cyber threats.

Improve Your Security Posture with ZenGRC

ZenGRC lets you view, understand, and respond to your IT and cyber risks. That visibility can then help you improve your security posture.

With a unified, real-time view of risk and compliance that is framed around your business priorities, you will have the insight needed to communicate with key stakeholders to make smart quickly, strategic decisions that will protect your enterprise, systems, and data; while earning the trust of your customers, partners, and employees.

ZenGRC integrates risk observation, assessment, and remediation operations into a single trusted source of truth. A risk operations center overviews your overall risk and compliance posture, while program-level reporting provides specific insights and indicators.

Schedule a demo today to reduce audit fatigue by reducing evidence collection to prevent mistakes and enhance productivity.

How Can RMIS Support Risk Management?

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Many standards and regulations to protect information security require an organization to identify, assess, and control its risks. Using a Risk Management Information System (RMIS) to assist with the process can ease that burden. Although traditionally positioned as a tool enabling better insurance communications, automating risk management also reduces the challenge (and chores) of the risk management process.

What Does It Mean to ‘Manage’ Risk?

Managing risk means actively protecting your data and IT environment. You need to be able to catalog your information assets, review the threats against them, find ways to control the risks, establish risk mitigation procedures, and then document all your efforts.

Cataloging your risk requires you to look at all information storage locations (physical and electronic) in your enterprise, and then review their access. Those threats include external ones such as hackers, and internal ones such as weak passwords.

Controlling risks requires finding ways to lock down your information environment, whether using a firewall or establishing role-based authorizations for access.

Mitigating risks means thinking about ways to lessen the impact of a potential event, such as through regular backups of your important data. Then document all of the decisions you make regarding your risk management, to demonstrate to others that you’ve taken a thoughtful, serious approach to risk management.

What Is an RMIS?

RMIS is an IT system that assists you with risk evaluation. It allows you to document your information assets, controls, mitigation procedures, and compliance requirements in a single location. Although RMIS were initially used for gathering information to provide to insurance brokers, many IT professionals now use these systems to help assemble necessary data to perform audits.

Consolidating the risk information and automating communications among stakeholders means that your risk manager and IT department can work more efficiently together. An RMIS allows organizations to understand their risk, so they can establish controls that will help them mitigate those risks. Another benefit to using RMIS: as cyber insurance becomes more important to avoid the financial shocks of a breach, organizations must provide the best data available to help their cyber insurers set accurate premiums.

What Are the Benefits of a Risk Management Information System (RMIS) in Your Organization?

RMIS tools help companies to anticipate possible threats and the attendant possible losses, and to spot patterns by providing efficient monitoring and reporting (to name only two benefits). These components, when combined, allow an organization to recognize trends in risks and to respond more quickly when danger occurs.

Some other potential benefits of implementing an RMIS:

  • Personalization of insurance policies and more accurate cyber insurance premiums.
  • Improved contingency planning.
  • A single source of truth about data security.
  • Increased system functionality.
  • High-risk event detection and mitigation.
  • Better organizational transparency and collaboration.

What Are the Primary Functions of an RMIS?

One of the most challenging aspects of information security is the coordination of information among departments to incorporate all safety measures. A risk management information system allows you to move away from the spreadsheets and word documents that make such compliance efforts clunky and difficult to execute.

Storing Documents

To provide information, you first must gather it. For example, when applying for cyber insurance, you need to be able to provide your policies, controls, risk evaluations, and risk mitigation strategies. Housing this information in a single location streamlines that process. Likewise, if your auditor is looking for such information, an RMIS provides allows you to aggregate data for that process too.

Automating Workflows

One benefit of an RMIS is that it automates workflows and clarifies employee responsibilities. For example, automating task management allows risk managers to assign duties and track the status of that work without the hassle of emails. In addition, by organizing the responsibilities inherent in cyber risk management and audit management, your risk and audit managers can create cross-functional teams that streamline the process. For example, risk and audit managers need access to your comprehensive cyber risk information. Rather than sending separate emails to your IT department coordinator, all three members of the organization can connect and share information through the system.

Real-time Analytics

In the cyber environment, risk changes constantly. For example, hackers find new exploits every day. The speed at which your risks can change requires a tool that provides you instant insights as well as instant mitigation response techniques. An RMIS will let you evaluate risks so that your data environment remains protected continuously.

Streamlining Reporting

Most CISOs recognize that providing easy-to-digest risk reports for senior management partners and the board of directors is a pain point. Using the appropriate RMIS tool for your organization can lessen your reporting burden. For example, rather than generating IT reports whose data needs to be entered manually into a spreadsheet, an RMIS tool can automate that process for charts that are both easy to generate and easy to read. These reports allow your C-suite and board to engage in the necessary oversight.

How Do You Streamline Workflow With an RMIS?

A successful RMIS is meant to provide workflow capabilities and information to multiple siloed groups within one corporate enterprise, while also providing a holistic picture of risk that allows users across the platform to make better decisions and avoid risk.

Permissions-based dashboards provide specific user profiles with the information they want in helpful, fast, and straightforward ways. This leads to richer, more flexible, and customized reporting.

For example, individuals with the appropriate rights can choose to report any related data fields in the system rather than only those assigned to a single, siloed business function. Even better, this reporting may be disseminated automatically by day, week, month, quarter, and more, assuring that the information reaches the essential individuals who require it.

An RMIS also entails streamlining workflows using warnings, approval processes, and tracking to turn manual operations into more efficient, automated ones.

This offers users a comprehensive, auditable history, allowing different persons to view the same data while assuring data integrity. An intelligent system with this set of checks and balances can reduce mistakes, organize and manage data, increase communication, create more efficient procedures, and stimulate more significant innovations.

The correct RMIS can interface with your existing systems without requiring considerable, time-consuming, and costly development. For example, a modular RMIS, with adjustable modules and unique integration solutions, may open doors to your silos with little development effort.

How Can an RMIS Enable a Risk Management Plan?

Your IT risk management plan requires your organization to estimate the impact of threats to your environment. That’s not easy, since a risk management plan requires a participation from a variety of vendors, departments, and controls needed to maintain system security. An RMIS can guide you through the tasks necessary to work with all those teams and acquire the necessary information from them. That RMIS can then maintain those lines of communication so that you can update data, and keep pace with the constantly evolving risks that you need to manage.

Simplify Risk Management With Reciprocity ZenRisk

With ZenRisk’s risk assessment tools and role-based authorization capabilities, you can provide all employees with the information they need to implement your risk management strategies. Empowering employees with the information they need allows you to maintain a strong corporate culture.

ZenRisk’s reporting tools provide easy-to-digest reports with graphics that clearly explain your risk profile. These reports give your board the necessary information they need (and no more than that, so directors aren’t overwhelmed) while saving you creation time.

For audits and documentation, ZenRisk provides a single source of truth by aggregating all records, reports, policies, procedures, and control listing in one place. Streamlining the audit process saves time and money and produces more substantial audit outcomes.

Schedule a demo to learn more about how ZenRisk can help your company establish an enterprise risk management program that effectively aligns with business objectives.

Tips for Managing Third-Party Risk in Health Care

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Data breaches against healthcare organizations affected more than 1 million people in 2020. The average total data breach cost in the same year was far higher in the healthcare industry ($7.13 million) than any other sector. In 2021 the average cost rose to $9.41 million.

As one can see, the healthcare industry is one of the most attractive targets for cyber attackers and data thieves. Why? Because this sector possesses the “crown jewels” of personal data that these adversaries want. Healthcare data is rich with information, including patients’ personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and financial information.

Cybercriminals obtain healthcare data to perpetrate fraud, steal identities, or launch ransomware attacks. A single healthcare record can be sold for $250 on the black market, while the next most valuable record is a payment card for only $5.40.

Such valuable data creates immense cybersecurity risks in healthcare. Third parties generate, manage, or hold this data, resulting in even more severe threats to healthcare organizations and their information security. This is why third-party risk management and healthcare data security are critical.

What is Healthcare Vendor Risk Management?

Third-party suppliers increasingly provide mission-critical operational and support services in the healthcare industry’s supply chain. That said, healthcare companies are finding it challenging to stay ahead of vendor breaches due to the volume of cyber attacks on supply chain suppliers. Current methods to manage vendor questionnaire assessments cannot scale to keep up with the growing vendor risk exposures.

As part of the digitization of healthcare, the most crucial IT vendors now host these systems in the cloud. The issue with this, though, is that we now rely on these outside suppliers to carry out essential operations and provide patient care.

The pain is felt by the healthcare organization when a vendor has an outage because of ransomware or another cybersecurity intrusion. And that suffering now extends far beyond the potential for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory non-compliance brought on by lost or stolen data; instead, the breaches affect healthcare organizations’ capacity to function and pose a risk to patient safety.

The Need for Third-party Risk Management in Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, attackers often leverage third-party vulnerabilities to access sensitive information, while defenders try to keep these bad actors out. One such attempt by defenders is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law formulated to help protect patient data and secure healthcare organizations.

Despite HIPAA regulations, cybersecurity attacks and data breaches targeting healthcare remain a severe and increasing threat. In addition, third parties, who play a vital role in healthcare supply chains, further exacerbate this threat.

HIPAA calls these third parties “business associates,” and the healthcare organizations are referred to as “covered entities.” Depending on the nature of their business, third parties may have access to PII, PHI, and other valuable data.
Unfortunately, they often fail to implement strong security controls to protect this data, making them, and by extension, healthcare organizations and patients, vulnerable to compromise.

To make matters worse, a 2020 survey found that 54% of healthcare vendors experienced a data breach of PHI, but only 36% notified providers because they were afraid to lose their business. This lack of accountability and transparency should worry healthcare providers and those whose PHI they collect or manage.

With a robust third-party risk management system, healthcare organizations can detect, identify, and remediate cybersecurity threats within their vendor tiering ecosystem, protect valuable patient information, and optimize vendor relationships.

Notes on Vendor Access et. al

There are several areas that healthcare organizations should prioritize and address as part of their third-party risk management program:

  • Vendor access to medical devices
  • Medical devices running legacy operating systems and code versions
  • Third-party scripts and plugins on websites
  • Access to PII

Vendor Access to Medical Devices

Healthcare organizations spend a great deal of money on medical devices, and most carry hefty support contracts. However, such agreements say little (or nothing) about what kind of access the third-party vendors will have or how the device will be supported or protected.

Several device manufacturers provide remote support but don’t always follow good cybersecurity hygiene. Therefore, the healthcare organization must enforce strong security policies and ensure that the vendor only has the access required to service the device and nothing more. In other words, the organization is responsible for protecting its data, not the vendor.

But not all healthcare providers take this responsibility seriously. A common mistake is granting device manufacturers VPN access with open elevated privileges. In addition to weak control policies, this increases the risk of cyberattacks. Adopting a zero-trust approach to network and data access by third parties is the best way to mitigate such risks.

Medical devices Running Legacy Operating Systems and Outdated codes.

Many data breaches occur because of unpatched operating systems, applications, and software code. For example, a June 2020 survey discovered that 65% of companies running old software had suffered data breaches.

In healthcare, outdated software is a severe problem. Since medical devices usually have long lifecycles, they have been in service for years with outdated software or operating systems. As a result, security vulnerabilities remain in old, unpatched software, which increases the risk of cyber threats.

That’s why it’s critical to update and patch software in medical devices regularly. In addition, wherever software vendors no longer support a particular application, healthcare organizations must transition to different, more secure, and up-to-date software.

Third-Party Scripts and Plugins on Websites

Third-party scripts and website plugins are outside the control of a healthcare provider’s IT ecosystem. In 2019, over 93% of web pages included at least one third-party resource, so it’s virtually impossible to avoid them. However, such resources also pose a significant cyber risk, leaving the organization open to attack.

It’s essential to conduct regular vulnerability scans to identify exploitable vulnerabilities or malicious code in scripts and websites. In addition, monitor the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests made by the company website to ensure that it doesn’t connect with malicious domains. Site content audits and script monitoring also help manage and minimize the risks of third-party scripts and plugins.

Access to Personally Identifiable Information

Healthcare organizations can better control access to PII through access assessment, sensitive data discovery, and classification. Access Assessment evaluates who has access to which data, how they got access, what they’re doing with it, and if they should still have access.

Sensitive data discovery is also essential to determine what information needs protecting and to what extent. Data classification involves tagging data to identify sensitive data and decide what you should implement protective controls.

Critical Elements of Third-party Risk Management in Healthcare

The overarching goal of third-party risk management in healthcare is to empower providers to minimize the risk from third parties and thus better protect their data. The program includes numerous activities that work together to strengthen their security posture.

Vendor Due Diligence

Healthcare organizations must perform due diligence on all vendors. It allows them to gauge the security risk posed by each high-risk vendor to the organization’s cybersecurity and data security. Due diligence is usually done through vendor questionnaires that assess and compare a vendor’s security setup to industry standards.

The questionnaire should include questions about the vendor’s data security practices, business recovery plans, and disaster recovery plans. In addition, their regulatory compliance with laws and industry standards like HIPAA compliance, Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) should also be verified.

Third-party Risk Assessment

In addition to due diligence, healthcare organizations must perform a third-party risk assessment. Vendor risk assessments evaluate the relationship and risks based on their services and devise plans to address them. Your company must implement both short-term and long-term measures to eliminate immediate threats.

Assess Vendor Cyberdefense and Governance

During the assessment process, it’s vital to understand every vendor’s cyber defense and governance ecosystem by asking questions like:

  • What network or perimeter security measures are in place?
  • Is firewall protection used?
  • Is access controlled via password-based systems or multi-factor authentication?
  • Does the vendor perform penetration testing and vulnerability scans?
  • Are vendor employees trained in cyber defense?
  • Who is primarily responsible for IT decision-making in the vendor’s organization?
  • Does the vendor outsource any IT services to fourth parties that can increase risk exposure?

Based on the information gathered from the above activities, the healthcare provider or third party must be prepared to take the required actions to eliminate any risks identified. It’s also essential to ensure that security measures required by HIPAA, HITECH, or other laws and industry standards are implemented by both the vendor and the healthcare organization.

ZenGRC is Your Third-Party Risk Expert

In the ever-growing cyber threat landscape, the healthcare industry is particularly vulnerable to bad actors looking to access healthcare systems and steal healthcare data.

Additionally, as third parties play an increasingly important role in the healthcare value chain, the risk to healthcare organizations is exponential.

Healthcare organizations cannot afford a laid-back attitude toward cybersecurity and data protection. Instead, they must adopt a robust third-party risk management program with the help of a comprehensive platform like ZenGRC.

ZenGRC is an integrated risk management platform that reveals third-party risk across the entire organization. It shows where third parties are creating risk, how it is changing, and how providers can manage it to mitigate business exposure.

ZenGRC helps operationalize risk management. It simplifies compliance and regulatory efforts with automation and workflows. Schedule a demo today to learn more.