You should know about Cyber Security Audit Strategy

 

Cyber Security Audit Strategy

In this Article, you'll learn about guidelines and standards for defining cyber security audit strategies. The purpose of a cyber security audit is to provide upper level management with an accurate assessment of the company security policies and procedures, and their effectiveness to create a secure cyber security posture. Part of the cyber security audit is to perform a risk assessment. Which has a primary goal of communicating the level of risk that exist with all the critical assets within the company. The other goal of the risk assessment is to identify how to respond to risk by creating a risk strategy plan.

 

 

This may involve responding by implementing security controls to mitigate the risk. Or transfer the risk. Or even accept the risk. Organizations will typically perform two types of cyber security audits, an internal audit, using internal staff to perform the audit, and an external audit that uses a third party company. It's recommended to do a mix. Now, for example, maybe even every six months you perform an internal audit but every two years use a third party company and do an external audit. This allows you to save on audit fees but still have the viewpoint of a third party auditor every few years. With both types of audits, the goal is to obtain recommendations on how to improve security within the organization.

Cyber Security Responsibilities 

 When we talk about cyber security within an organization, cyber security has three critical goals for the company. The first goal of cyber security within the organization is, to protect any sensitive or confidential data and intellectual property. Using cyber security methodologies you want to protect network resources and prevent these network resources from being hacked or involved in a security incident. And finally, you want to ensure there is accountability within your environment including accountability with devices and the data owned by the organization.

Cyber Security Audit Scope 

When performing your cyber security audit, you want to determine the scope of the audit. Some key areas that a cyber security audit typically includes, are assessing the data security policies for the network database, and applications that have been deployed within the organization. Reviewing the data loss prevention measures that exist. Looking at the network access controls that have been implemented and other security controls that are in place to protect company assets. You want to review the detection and prevention systems that have been configured to detect malicious activity and response. And then finally, you want to review the incident response program that's been implemented and look for ways to improve it.

Cyber Security Audit Best Practices 

When planning for, or performing a cyber security audit, there are a number of audit best practices that should be followed. First, be sure that security professionals are properly trained on cyber security and cyber security threats and incident response. Be sure to take a holistic approach to cyber security threat assessment. In today's day and age devices are all interconnected together and many appliances have embedded technologies. So be sure to address the bigger picture and not just one technology.

Auditors should be familiar with credential theft techniques used by hackers such as Pass the Hash, token impersonation, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Where the attacker captures the credentials and then uses those credentials to authenticate to other systems on the network. Some other important cyber security audit best practices are cyber security auditors should leverage existing frameworks and guidelines. There are a number of cyber security and threat assessment guides that have been published by NIST, for instance. For example, the framework for improving critical infrastructure cyber security that auditors can use as a guidance to make the audit more manageable. Auditors should look to existing regulations and forthcoming regulations and incorporate those practices into their audit. For example, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCIDSS, is a set of security standards for companies that accept, process, or store credit card information.

When performing the threat assessment and determining risk, auditors should always associate a threat with the vulnerability. Bottom line is that the threat exists because the vulnerability is there and has the potential of being exploited. Remember that the biggest security risk to the organization are the employees. Investing in security awareness training will increase the security knowledge and awareness of the entire organization as a result and increase the security posture of the organization. A few other cyber security best practices that should be followed always remember that the basic security principles still hold true and have been tried and proven time and time again.

For example, implementing a defense in depth strategy and following the principle of least privilege, is effective in any environment. It's important to fully test your incident response plan to be sure that everyone knows the role when an incident occurs. Performing regular test allows staff to keep the response processes fresh in their minds, which will decrease the time it takes to respond when an actual incident occurs. The last point to make is that your cyber security strategy must be agile, meaning that your cyber security strategy must be adaptable and scalable, because attacks are constantly mutating and new attack methods are constantly discovered by the hackers. In this video, you learned about defining cyber security audit strategies.