What is a security threat assessment? It’s a specialized assessment carried out by a team of security experts to evaluate whether something poses a potential risk to your business. There are many types of security threat assessments – some are carried out on individuals, others are done on businesses, and many revolve around possible cyber threats.
We’ll discuss these in more detail throughout this guide, and you’ll also see a quick breakdown of a comprehensive security threat assessment, plus the benefits of doing them regularly.
Importance of Security Threat Assessments
The benefits of security threat assessments are obvious. They enable you to identify and spot risks before they harm your company. An assessment lets you see what might be a problem and work on how to mitigate these risks. The result is a much higher percentage of security incidents avoided, which can save your business precious money and resources.
Without proper security threat assessments, there’s no way to protect your business from unknown threats. Serious problems are more likely to occur, leading to devastating business consequences. All it takes is one hidden threat to shut down a business for good; you can prevent this with a security threat assessment.
Steps for a Comprehensive Security Assessment
How do you carry out a proper security threat assessment? It depends on the type of threat you’re assessing. Businesses face all manner of threats, from insider threats to physical threats and online ones. The exact process you go through will vary slightly based on what you’re assessing, though a comprehensive threat assessment must cover these key points:
- Identify All Possible Threats: No matter what you’re assessing, you should identify all the possible ways it can threaten your business. For example, if you’re looking at structural threats, then you’ll list things like thefts/break-ins, bad weather conditions, natural disasters, etc.
- Consider How A Threat Impacts Your Business: Think about what would happen if a threat did come to pass. E.g. What would be the impact of an employee embezzling funds from your company? You should consider things like the financial impact, how it affects your brand reputation, and so on.
- Identify A Threat’s Likelihood Levels: What are the chances of this threat actually happening? Some threats are more theoretical than realistic, while others have an extremely high likelihood of happening.
- Analyze The Threat’s Risk Level: Look at the threats and figure out which ones are the biggest risks. You’ll decide based on the likelihood of the threat happening and its potential impact on your business. For instance, a threat that can cause severe financial damage to your business and be highly likely to occur is about the maximum risk level possible.
- Create Solutions: The final step in a security threat assessment is to create solutions that combat individual threats. Part of this step involves identifying your weakest points and where threats are most likely to come from. Then, you can develop a security plan to prevent the threats from happening.
Understanding IT Threat Assessments
An IT threat assessment is sometimes called an information security threat assessment, and it focuses on the biggest threats to your IT systems. You will search for and uncover all the things that increase your risk of issues like cyber attacks, data breaches, or server outages.
Information threat assessments are the most popular security threat assessments these days, partially down to the fact that three in four US companies are at risk of cyber attacks. Cyber threats are increasingly problematic and common, which increases the need to conduct this specific type of security threat assessment.
Conducting an Information Security Assessment
You’ll be happy to know that an information security assessment follows the same structure as a general security threat assessment. The only difference is that it’s solely focused on threats that can harm your IT security. This will mean you look at all the possible cybersecurity threats posed to your business, such as:
- Hackers
- Malware/ransomware
- Phishing attacks
- Insider threats
You then identify how these threats could come about. More often than not, this requires a full-scale analysis and testing of your cybersecurity systems. Many businesses employ ethical hackers to test security features and identify potential breaches. You can also run an analysis of previous cyber incidents to spot patterns – like multiple employees falling victim to phishing scams.
The nature of information security threats means they’re all going to be in the High-Risk category. Cyber attacks and data breaches can cost thousands, sometimes even millions, of dollars to fix. Therefore, the final part of this assessment will look at how to improve cybersecurity throughout your business and prevent these threats from ever happening.
Benefits of Regular Security Threat Assessments
It’s got good enough (or wise) only to run one security threat assessment and call it a day. Regular assessments are beneficial because they help you identify any new or more prominent threats. The business world is an ever-changing landscape, and you never know what might become the next biggest threat.
We’ve spoken about IT security risks, and that’s a perfect example. They weren’t always major issues, but the last two decades have shown a rise in cyber threats, with new vulnerabilities appearing every year. If you’re not running regular security threat assessments, you’ll miss new problems and leave your business exposed.
To summarize, if you want to stay on top of business security and protect yourself from all threats, you need to keep carrying out security threat assessments and adjusting your plans based on the new findings.
Enhance Overall Business Security With Security Threat Assessments
Don’t let your business go unprotected or unaware of any lingering threats. A security threat assessment will give you the protection you need, helping you avoid costly consequences. At The Cobalt Agency, we conduct investigations, background checks, and security risk assessments for businesses of all sizes. Feel free to contact us today if you want to protect your enterprise.
