Ransomware and the C-Suite: What Cybersecurity Leaders Need to Know
Tip #1: Increase Communication and Reporting to Leadership
The feedback is clear. Executives want and need more communication from cybersecurity practitioners about ransomware threats. They also want more detail, depth, and explanation in that reporting to ensure that they can fully understand the landscape to facilitate more informed decisions and supporting calls for cybersecurity investment.
To meet this need, organizations must implement new reporting processes and create consensus with leadership about what information they care about most to deliver powerful reporting that supports the decision-making process.
Tip #2: Temper Overconfidence as Needed
Security leaders must be clear and realistic about the cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities the organization faces and its resilience in the face of a ransomware attack.
They must also make that threat understandable and relatable. This means cutting through the technical jargon and measuring and reporting cyber risk in a language that makes sense to business leaders. How will an attack impact the organization’s balance sheet? What will it cost the company in total? BitSight can answer those questions in straightforward terms.
With BitSight, security and risk management teams can simulate their organization’s financial exposure across thousands of cyber events, including ransomware, denial of service, compliance issues, supply chain attacks, and more.
They’ll get actionable metrics on the financial impact of ransomware and other attack vectors, including denial-of-service (DDoS) incidents and extortion attacks, data theft and privacy breaches, and even third-party service provider failures such as an outage, disruption, or a malicious attack that results in data loss. And, because third parties can hold an organization accountable for cyber-related damages or losses, these compensation claims are factored into calculations.
By transforming the technical side of cybersecurity into financial language, security leaders can better guide C-suite discussions around cyber risk management and justify new technology investments.
Tip #3: Tailor the Message Delivered to Executives
When it comes to the ransomware threat, executives worry about different things. The top concern is regulatory sanctions (38%) followed by loss of data or intellectual property (34%). Other concerns include loss of confidence among employees, loss of business due to outages, worry that data will be compromised even after paying a ransom, reputational harm, and remediation costs.
Risk tolerance also varies by industry, so it's important for security leaders to focus on the top areas that executives care most about. For example, if regulatory compliance is a high priority, security leaders need to understand the regulatory landscape and the consequences of non-compliance. They must also position risk to leadership in a way that aligns specifically with their concerns, and build reporting around what’s most important.
One way to do this is to show how the company’s security program stacks up against others in the industry. For instance, firms in the highly regulated financial sector could compare their cybersecurity performance to peers and competitors. They can then use these in depth insights to uncover the standards of care that exist among their peer group and the level of security performance that the company should attain to be “best-in-class.”
They can also use these comparisons to identify gaps in their own organization’s security performance, create informed improvement plans, and confidently report to the C-suite about where investments must be prioritized and resources allocated.