What is a Cyber Security Vulnerability Assessment?
A cyber security vulnerability assessment is a review of security weaknesses in an IT system. Vulnerability assessments determine whether an organization’s network, systems, and hardware have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. Ultimately, an assessment enables organizations to remediate vulnerabilities to reduce cyber risk.
Optimizing Your Cyber Security Vulnerability Assessments
Organizations today are more reliant than ever on partners, service providers, vendors, and managed services. While these third parties offer tremendous benefit, they also represent a measure of risk for an organization. As vendors are onboarded with ever greater speed, many organizations are looking to improve the cyber security vulnerability assessments to better scale their third-party risk management program to meet the needs of their business.
Traditionally, cyber security vulnerability assessments have involved risk assessment questionnaires completed by vendors themselves on a yearly or periodic basis. While questionnaires still offer value, they can’t provide the real-time visibility into security performance of organizations needed to mitigate third-party risk.
Bitsight can help. With solutions that provide tools for continuous monitoring of the security posture of vendors, as well as tools to validate vendor responses with external data, Bitsight enables organizations to optimize vulnerability assessments and achieve measurable cyber risk reduction.
The Challenge Of Questionnaire-Based Assessments
While cyber security vulnerability assessments mainly based on questionnaires have long been the norm, relying solely on questionnaires can leave your organization vulnerable for several key reasons.
- Questionnaires capture a single point in time. Because questionnaires are typically completed yearly, they don’t alert your to changes in a vendor’s security performance in the intervening months. Yet, because security posture can change overnight, you need a more continuous measure of your vendors’ security status.
- Questionnaire answers may be prone to bias. Security and compliance professionals within vendor organizations are frequently overconfident about the maturity and effectiveness of their security programs, and don’t want to come across as a risky vendor to their partners. Consequently, their answers on a questionnaire may not reflect genuine risk within their organization.
- Individuals completing questionnaires don’t always have all the facts. Frequently, the answers on a questionnaire are based on information provided by others within the organization, and that information may be limited or inaccurate.
- Questionnaires lead to a false sense of security. Questionnaires may lead risk managers into a false belief that vendors’ IT environments are adequately secured. This can lead to a lack of precautions and ultimately to a data breach.
Questionnaires undoubtedly still have a place in cyber security vulnerability assessments. They can be especially helpful when taking a deeper dive into a vendor’s security programs and controls. Basing your questionnaires on industry-standard assessment methodologies like SANS Top 20 Critical Security Controls or The NIST Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity can help you develop insightful questionnaires and customize them to the types of vendors you’re vetting.
However, as you seek to optimize your vendor assessments, you’ll want to include a cyber security assessment tool that continuously monitors a vendor’s security posture. That’s where Bitsight comes in.
