For technology teams, the spookiest aspect of October is cybersecurity risk. It takes continuous analysis of internal and external data and educating your organization to help mitigate the likelihood of a cybersecurity incident. In this process, it is important to partner with a risk management platform that identifies leading indicators and observes the annually increasing trends of importance placed on tracking cyber risk.

For instance, over the last 13 years, the United States has led the charts with the highest average data breach costs, topping $9.48 million this year alone [1]. With the frequency and cost of data breaches continuing to increase, companies are left with limited resources to mitigate cybersecurity risk in their supply chain.

The purpose of this article is to help empower organizations to protect their critical data. This starts with cultivating a culture of security awareness from within. Most individuals have heard and understand the basics of data security but fostering a security culture is more challenging.

We refer to security culture as a group of security-related values, attitudes, assumptions and norms that can be seen in the actions and behaviors of all personnel within an organization. These security influences can be evidenced within an employee’s day-to-day tasks, but also should impact the products and services that an organization delivers. There are a few key ways to help instill security culture within your organization:

1. Require a base level of Security Awareness Training (SAT) and provide advanced courses for the personnel who need to secure products and services or hold a high access level.
2. Ensure employees understand security is a shared responsibility among all personnel.
3. Make cybersecurity topics an engaging and fun portion of an employee’s development.
4. Provide rewards or incentives to strengthen positive security culture.
5. Prioritize cybersecurity concerns that are most likely to occur like Social Engineering, Malware, and Hacking.

Cybersecurity Training Resources

Cybersecurity is a topic that may seem overwhelming to train at first glance, and it may be difficult to know where to start. There is an abundance of free and publicly available resources to help organizations take measurable first steps to incrementally improve their own security posture from providers such as:

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
2. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

Need more information?

ISN helps organizations standardize a tiered, third-party risk management program across all supply chain participants that pose a cybersecurity risk to your organization. We accomplish this by establishing a baseline of cybersecurity due diligence, then increasing that level of review as suppliers become higher risk. Common first steps in this process are collecting Cyber Questionnaire responses, requiring Cyber Liability Insurance and reviewing a supplier’s Cyber Risk Rating. As a supplier’s risk level increases, we can verify internal cybersecurity policies through Document Collection and even assess a supplier’s internal security posture with Cyber Plus.

If you are interested in learning more about ISN’s supplier management system to help you reach your cybersecurity goals, contact ISN.

[1] Statista