Note: This article is from John Germain, the founder of Security Moments. Security Moments is a cybersecurity services provider dedicated to guiding small businesses through the complexities of cybersecurity through essential training and expertise to help secure your business without breaking the bank. Visit Security Moments to get a free regulatory compliance checklist. 

We overcomplicate cybersecurity. 

Yes, there are big threats out there with complex technology at the helm. But some of the most important steps that you can take are pretty easy. 

I’ve spent 20+ years as a VP and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). I help companies make simple changes to improve their security. In this article, I’ll share my simple, four-step framework with you.

The basics of cybersecurity don’t need big budgets. They need understanding, commitment, and the right strategies. With some time and effort, any company, including yours, can improve its security posture and gain peace of mind. 

What Are the Risks of Poor Security?

Poor security can have severe consequences for your business. These risks fall into three main categories: financial, operational, and reputational.

Financial risks are the most immediate and tangible. For example, a data breach can cost a lot, whether through theft, ransom payments, or regulatory fines.

Operational risks arise when a security incident disrupts your business processes. Ransomware can lock you out of critical systems, grinding operations to a halt. Data loss or corruption can lead to downtime, impacting productivity and service delivery. This disruption has a cascading effect that hurts the rest of your business as well.

Reputational risks can be the most damaging risk in the long term. Once you lose the trust of a customer or the public, it causes long term damage to your brand and your bottom line.

Where Do Attacks Occur?

Most cyber threats exploit three basic weaknesses: people, identity management, and systems.

  1. People: Well-intentioned people are often the easiest targets. Social engineering, quid pro quo, and phishing attacks are some examples. In each case, an attacker uses someone’s trust, lack of awareness, or emotions to exploit a vulnerability. The most important step is training.
  2. Identity Management: Weak passwords and compromised login information make attacks easy to execute. Enforcing strong password policies and multi-factor sign-ins can prevent these attacks.
  3. Vulnerabilities: Bad actors may exploit software and hardware vulnerabilities. Regular updates and patches are essential to keep your system secure.

What Can You Do?

Security technology and tools can be expensive and often require significant overhead to manage and maintain. But there are ways you can control these costs by first focusing on building a strong foundation for your security program. To get started, focus on these four areas:

  1. Training your employees: Educate them on recognizing and responding to threats.
  2. Understanding your risk profile: Know your vulnerabilities to make well-informed security investments.
  3. Preparing for the unexpected: Develop and maintain a robust incident response plan.
  4. Put in place a governance framework: Stay the course and prepare for the long term.

Step 1: Training

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.” — Prince Caspian

Training is not exciting, but it works. Small improvements in understanding transform your cybersecurity culture from passive to engaged. But to get there, it starts with education.

Your top concern might be security, but it isn’t for everyone (at least, not yet). Training turns vulnerabilities into strengths. It turns employees who would click on a phishing email into employees who will report and notify colleagues of that very same email.

But not all training programs are the same.

What to Look for in a Cybersecurity Training Program

A good cybersecurity training program should cover the following:

  • How to spot phishing attacks
  • Why password security is critical
  • What do do when you suspect a threat

Tips for Success

To make your training program successful, ensure it requires active participation and engagement. Use interactive modules, simulations, and quizzes to reinforce learning. Set clear evaluation metrics to measure the effectiveness of the training.

More Considerations

  • Buy-in: Training requires commitment from all levels of the organization. Leadership must support and take part in the training to set a positive example. If the leadership doesn’t care, neither will the rest of the company.
  • Consistency: Training should always reinforce key messages. This helps engrain security into the company’s culture. Avoid one-off sessions; instead, incorporate continuous learning opportunities. Find axioms or phrases to help with memory. Remind people in meetings.
  • Budget: Keep your training focused and straightforward. Fancy, feature-rich programs can be costly. The key is delivering clear, concise messages that stays front of mind.
  • Timeline: Long, annual training doesn’t work. Opt for more frequent and faster training to keep the information fresh and relevant.

Note: If you struggle to get a budget or time for training. You might have to start with Step 2 to win leadership’s buy-in. 

Step 2: Risk Assessment

“One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose.” — Randy Pausch

A risk assessment helps you understand your vulnerabilities.

I usually recommend this as a second step since training takes less time to start. But if leadership ignores the need for training, a risk assessment arms you with data to show the risks and ROI of a cybersecurity training program.

Steps for a Comprehensive Risk Assessment

  1. Identify Critical Assets: Start by pinpointing your most valuable assets. A valuable asset is anything a hacker might sell, ransom, or otherwise use to help themselves. These can include:
    • Customer data
    • Employee data
    • Financial data
    • Intellectual property
    • System credentials
  2. Analyze Threats and Vulnerabilities: A threat or vulnerability is a possible weak point in your defense. This could include both external and internal threats. Some examples include:
    • Malware
    • Hackers
    • Negligence
    • Insider attack
  3. Don’t worry about identifying every possible threat, but find the most likely sources.
  4. Check Impact: Assess the impact of a security incident on your business. This includes financial losses, operational disruptions, and reputational damage. Ask questions like, “What if a hacker gained access to a core system? How would this impact the organization?”
  5. Involve All Departments: A full risk assessment needs input from all departments. Different teams can provide unique insights into various threats and vulnerabilities they see.
  6. Risk Register and Heat Map: Document and organize risks in a register to keep them visible. Use a heat map to rank threats based on their likelihood and negative impact. This visual tool illustrates risks to senior management so they better understand the risks. This exercise helps to guide security investments.
  7. Communicate in Business Terms: Translate technical threats into business impacts. Discuss the risk’s bottom-line impact or return on investment (ROI). This helps senior management understand the importance of investing in cybersecurity measures.
  8. Cost Analysis: Compare the cost of security incidents against the cost to mitigate them. Make sure to include all costs (not only financial) in your calculation. Reputation, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance are also relevant to senior management.

Considerations

  • Budget: sealing every risk may not be possible. Sometimes, the cost of addressing a risk might outweigh the damage it could cause. In such cases, it is ok to “accept” a risk, but this decision should be well thought out.
  • Risk Transfer: Consider options like cyber insurance to transfer some of the identified risks. This can be a cost-effective way to manage potential losses.
  • Timeline: Adress the highest risks first. Focus on threats that pose the highest impact and offer the highest return on investment.

Step 3: Incident Response and Disaster Recovery

“Even a correct decision is wrong when it was taken too late.” — Lee Iacocca

Breaches happen. I can’t promise anything will ensure 100% security.

That’s why a response plan is so important. You’ll need two kinds of plans.

  • An Incident Response Plan (IRP)
  • A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

You will detect, respond to, and recover from any incident with proper preparation.

How to Develop an Incident Response Plan (IRP)

An IRP defines the steps to detect an incident and the tasks in response.

  1. Use Your Risk Assessment: Use the insights from your risk assessment. From there, focus your IRP on the highest-risk areas first.
  2. Outline Detection Steps: Define the steps for detecting incidents. This includes monitoring your systems, spotting a breach, and specifying any automated detection tools. This includesThis includes monitoring systems, identifying signs of a breach, and using automated tools for early detection.
  3. Outline Response Steps: Detection is only half of the plan. Outline the response steps. These should include containment procedures and communication protocols to inform relevant stakeholders. Even something as simple as a designated slack channel for incident response is a critical step.
  4. Define Roles and Responsibilities: Assign roles and responsibilities to your response team. Make sure everyone knows their job during an incident. From initial detection to final recovery, ensure everyone understands their tasks. This includes technical staff, communication teams, and senior management.

How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

A DRP outlines the steps to maintain or revive infrastructure or systems after a disaster.

  1. Assess Damage: Assess the damage and focus on critical systems first.
  2. Restore Critical Systems and Data: Use a phase restoration process to lessen downtime. For example:
    • Phase 1: Essential Services: restore essential services like network connectivity, email systems, and communication tools.
    • Phase 2: Core Business Applications: Proceed with restoring core business applications, databases, and transaction processing systems.
    • Phase 3: Secondary Systems: Restore secondary systems, such as internal collaboration tools, non-critical databases, and peripheral services.
  3. System Validation and Testing: Perform tests to ensure systems are in good working order. Test their function, the data integrity, as well as UAT.
  4. Offsite Backups: Maintain regular offsite backups of all critical data.

Considerations

  • Preparation and Training: Both the IRP and DRP should be living documents that you test and update regularly. Conduct regular training sessions and simulations to make sure everyone knows their role.
  • Communication Plans: Effective communication is crucial during a security incident. Develop a communication plan for your different channels. Whether internal employee notification,s customer channels, partners, or even media relations—plan in advance.
  • Compliance and Legal: Ensure your plans align with regulatory requirements and legal obligations. This includes data breach notification laws and industry-specific regulations.

Step 4: Governance

“Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance.” — Ban Ki-moon

Governance is the long game of cybersecurity. It’s all about continuous improvement of processes, policies, training, oversight, and more. It ensures that your security measures align with business objectives and regulatory requirements.

Here are some things to help you get started.

Develop Security Policies

Develop detailed policies covering all relevant aspects of cybersecurity such as:

  • Guidelines for data protection
  • Access controls
  • Acceptable use policies
    Your security policies should help to reduce systemic exposure to risk.

Your policies should align with company goals and relevant regulations. Pay attention to industry standards, data protection laws, and other legal requirements.

Put in place Your Governance Framework

  1. Assign Oversight: Pick a dedicated team to oversee your cybersecurity progress. This group should include members from different departments to ensure a holistic approach.
  2. Regular Reviews and Updates: Security policies and procedures must be dynamic. Review and update them regularly to adapt to new threats, technologies, and business changes. Scheduled audits and feedback loops are crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness.

Tips for Success

  • Promote a Culture of Security: Security should be a top-down initiative. Leadership must support and advocate for cybersecurity best practices. This, in turn, shows the organization that security is a priority. You’ll know you’ve succeeded when employees talk with their peers about security.
  • Continuous Improvement: Regular audits and reviews are vital for continuous improvement. These assessments help identify gaps and areas for enhancement. Use the findings from audits to refine policies and practices.

Conclusion

Good cybersecurity is about common sense.

As I mentioned at the start, you don’t need big budgets to get started. What you do need is good training, a thoughtful risk assessment, and a couple of written plans to help you in times of crisis.

Once you have those resources, you can improve your security posture with a governance framework. Gain accountability, direction, and a way to continue your progress toward a secure organization.

John Germain is the Founder of Security Moments. If you’d like to learn more or access their free Regulatory & Data Compliance Checklists, just visit their resources page