What is Cybersecurity Risk Monitoring?
Cybersecurity is complicated, there are an almost unlimited number of ways that hackers can break into companies to steal information, cause business interruption, or steal funds from bank accounts. Cybersecurity Risk Monitoring involves checking a company’s external digital footprint for issues that could lead to these events happening.
Discovering A Digital Footprint
A company’s digital footprint consists of all the assets you can discover about a company over the Internet. A digital footprint is made up of:
- The types of servers in use to run a website, e-commerce shop, or other application
- The types of software in use
- The email addresses of staff members
- The social media accounts used by the company
- The domain names of the company and its subsidiaries
- The various 3rd parties a company uses which are connected to them
DynaRisk goes out and scours the web for these different items and links them all together with our technology to build a picture of the company we want to map. After the discovery process is complete, Cybersecurity Risk Monitoring tools will go out and check all the discovered assets and technology for issues that could lead to getting hacked.
Checking for Cybersecurity Issues
Once all these devices, services, and applications have been discovered, various checks are run on them to see if they are at risk. DynaRisk looks for things like vulnerabilities, out-of-date software, hacker chatter, and stolen data from the Dark Web.
This checking is passive and does not involve the active targeting of a company’s assets. We check for information just like an ordinary person would who is browsing a website.
Analyze Results & Generate Risk Signals
Some companies have a relatively small number of cyber security issues while others have a vast amount of things that could lead to them being hacked. Some issues are relatively benign while others are critical.
We find Cybersecurity risk issues on about 98% of larger companies and 90% of smaller companies on average. This means that almost every company has some cyber risk issues that they could be managing better.
DynaRisk analyses all the results of our scans and groups and prioritizes the issues into Cyber Risk Signals. While we might find 1,000 vulnerabilities on a website, this might only represent one Risk Signal. It is much easier for someone to understand that there are “Critical vulnerabilities on your website” rather than send them 1,000 individual alerts for each issue found.
Once Risk Signals are generated, we now know how risky the company is for hackers to break into.
Monitoring for Cyber Risks
Once results are available for a company, we can then monitor that company against other similar companies or whole portfolios of companies.
This lets us answer very important questions like:
- Is this company at higher or lower risk of cyber attack compared to another?
- Out of 100 companies, which is the highest risk of being hacked?
- Are there any urgent issues this company should do right now that could improve its defenses against cyber attacks?
Armed with answers to these questions, you can start working to improve the risk posture of a single company or whole portfolios of companies to make them more resilient to cyber risks. This in turn results in fewer hacks that lead to theft of funds, theft of information, interruption of business, and other issues that can significantly damage a business or cause them to go out of business entirely.
Now that you know what Cybersecurity Risk Monitoring is, check out our next article in the series, Cybersecurity Risk Monitoring – Common Uses. Want to find out more? Visit our product page to find out exactly how Breach Check works.