Adopt Threat Modeling for Enhanced Protection

You never reach the finish line in the race for the best Cybersecurity. The best you can do is pass ‘Go,’ collect your $200 and keep playing. Businesses must continue to take proactive steps as cyber threats continue to increase. Protecting your sensitive data and assets from cybercriminals is a constant, ongoing task. Threat tactics change as cyber-defenses improve, this danger to data security is persistent and attacks come from many different places.

More than ever, office systems are digitally sophisticated these, and just about every activity relies on some type of technology and data sharing. Cybercriminals can breach these systems from several entry points. The list of vulnerable devices includes computers, smartphones, cloud applications, and network infrastructure.

Cybercriminals are estimated to be able to penetrate 93% of company networks.

If you want to help your organization fight these intrusions, take a look at Threat Modelling, an approach that involves identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities to your company’s assets and systems by prioritizing risk management and mitigation strategies.

More and more, attacks are coming your way – it’s not a matter of IF, but of WHEN, and some will be successful – largely due to untrained or unaware employees falling for phishing schemes. Once the fox is in the henhouse, what do you do? This practice helps keep the henhouse door closed, mitigating the risk of falling victim to a costly cyber incident.

Here are the steps you can follow to conduct a threat model.

Identify Potentially Vulnerable Assets

As a first step, this is practically a no-brainer: Identify assets that are most critical to your business. These include sensitive data, intellectual property, and financial information, among others. What is it that cybercriminals will be going after?

Be sure to include phishing-related assets like company email accounts. Business email compromise (BEC) is a fast-growing method of attack. It capitalizes on breached company email logins.

Identify Potential Threats

Now that you’ve identified and prioritized your assets, identify potential threats to those assets, which do tend to fall into ‘The Usual Suspects’ category. Some common threats could be cyber-attacks such as phishing. Others would be ransomware, malware, or social engineering.

Physical breaches or insider threats are other categories of threats. This is where employees or vendors have access to sensitive information.

Threats are not always purposefully malicious – it could be a lack of training. Human error causes approximately 88% of data breaches. So, make sure you’re aware of mistake-related threats, such as:

Using weak passwords

Unclear cloud use policies

Lack of employee Security Awareness Training

Poor or non-existent BYOD policies

Assess Probabilities and Potential Consequences

Rank your risk management and mitigation strategies according to the likelihood and impact of the threats you have identified. Businesses must understand how likely each threat is to occur as well as the potential impact and consequences for their operations, reputation, and financial stability.

Assess the threat likelihood based on current statistics as you perform a thorough vulnerability assessment. It's best that this assessment is performed by a trusted 3rd party IT service provider. If you’re doing your assessment with only internal input, or by your regular IT provider you’re bound to miss something. Also, it’s human nature for people to hide mistakes and sloppy work.

Here at ITFIRM.COM, we offer a FREE non-intrusive scan and report of the state of your network and security. Details are at the bottom of this page. We have performed these assessments many, many times, and it is extremely rare that we don’t find security problems.

Rank your Risk Management Strategies by Priority

As you prioritize your risk management strategies, base their ranking on the likelihood and impact of each potential threat. Most businesses can’t tackle everything at once due to time and cost constraints. So, it’s important to rank solutions based on the biggest impact on security.

Some common strategies to consider implementing:

Access controls

Firewalls

Intrusion detection systems

Employee training and awareness programs

Endpoint device management

Businesses must also determine which strategies are most cost-effective. They should also align with their business goals.

Reviewing and Updating the Model is an Ongoing Process

Threat modeling is not a ‘one and done’ type of thing – it’s continuous. Since cyber threats are constantly evolving, so must your defenses. Regularly review and update your threat models. This will help ensure that security measures are not only effective but aligned with your business objectives.

How Threat Modeling Benefits your Business

Improves your Understanding of Threats and Vulnerabilities

If you would like to gain a better understanding of the dangers out there, threat modeling can help. It also uncovers vulnerabilities that could impact your assets by identifying gaps in your security measures and helps uncover risk management strategies.

Continuous threat modeling can also help companies stay out in front of new threats. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is birthing new types of cyber threats every day. Companies that are complacent can and will fall victim to new attacks.

More Cost-effective Risk Management

Prioritizing threats and the corresponding strategies to mitigate them optimizes company resources and security investments. This will help ensure that businesses divide resources effectively and efficiently.

Business Alignment

One of the benefits threat modeling brings to the table is that it can help ensure that security measures align with the business objectives, reducing the potential impact of security measures on business operations. It also helps coordinate security, goals, and operations.

Reduces your Risk from Cyber Incidents

Employing threat modelling doesn’t mean cyber-attacks will magically stop, but implementing targeted risk management strategies reduce risks – specifically the likelihood and impact of security incidents. This will help to protect your assets and reduce the negative consequences of a security breach.