Author: Mikhael Chammaa

With cyber security threats increasing in frequency, severity and complexity, organisations are turning to cyber security frameworks for a methodical approach to enhancing their cyber security posture.

One of the most widely used frameworks in Australia is the ASD Essential 8, which provides practical cyber security guidance for organisations of all sizes. Unlike other frameworks such as ISO 27001, which require extensive organisational involvement, the Essential 8 focuses on eight specific controls, such as hardening IT systems, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and backups. This makes it more manageable for IT and security teams, often without requiring significant leadership buy-in.

However, implementing the Essential 8 framework is not without its challenges. Defining the right scope, prioritising mitigation strategies, and managing resource constraints can lead to delays and bottlenecks. In these situations, leveraging an experienced Essential 8 provider can be crucial for success.

In this article, we cover the top five criteria to consider when selecting an ASD Essential 8 service provider.

#1 They have depth and breadth of expertise

The Essential Eight isn’t a one-time activity or a tick-box checklist. It’s an ongoing, risk-based program with four maturity levels (Maturity Level Zero through to Maturity Level Three). A comprehensive partner should offer a holistic suite of services supporting your compliance journey, from assessment to ongoing maintenance. This includes identifying security gaps, assisting with implementation, providing continuous monitoring and aiding in incident response and recovery. This comprehensive approach helps you incrementally achieve higher maturity levels and a stronger security posture. 

A comprehensive partner should offer a holistic suite of services supporting your compliance journey.

#2 They have capability to remediate

While niche cyber security companies excel at identifying threats and vulnerabilities, they often lack the necessary IT expertise to comprehensively address and validate fixes of identified security gaps. This can force you to either rely on stretched internal resources or engage another provider for remediation, leading to increased project complexity, cost overruns and delays. Choosing a compliance partner with both cyber expertise and in-house remediation capability streamlines your journey towards compliance by ensuring efficient identification, remediation and validation.

The right provider can streamline your compliance by ensuring efficient identification, remediation and validation.

#3 They offer comprehensive reporting with an executive summary

Look for a company that offers dual-track reporting. This means they provide comprehensive and detailed reports tailored for your IT team that address specific technical aspects and remediation strategies. Additionally, they offer simplified summaries in business language for executives, highlighting key findings and risks. This dual approach ensures stakeholders are informed, from technical specialists to executive decision-makers, fostering a collaborative environment that is supportive of cyber security initiatives.

Executive level reporting fosters a collaborative environment that is supportive of cyber security initiatives.

#4 They offer a tailored approach suited to your organisation

Choose an Essential 8 service provider that tailors their approach to your organisation. This means prioritising a risk-based strategy over a cookie-cutter approach. Look for evidence in their proposal that demonstrates an understanding of your business and its unique challenges. This ensures they are proposing a customised solution that effectively enhances your organisation’s security posture.

Look for evidence in their proposal that demonstrates an understanding of your business and its unique challenges.

#5 They are a good fit

When selecting an Essential 8 provider, prioritise compatibility with your business. Look for providers with a track record serving similar-sized businesses and who offer flexibility. Large consultancies are renowned for low responsiveness and high overheads, so weigh these drawbacks against the benefits of using them. For any provider, speak with references from previous clients to understand their expertise and service quality. This comprehensive approach ensures you find a cost-effective partner who delivers a bespoke solution tailored to your organisation’s specific needs and budget.

By considering these top 5 factors, you’ll find an ASD Essential 8 compliance partner who can streamline your compliance journey and bolster your organisation’s security posture.

Look for providers with a track record serving similar-sized businesses and who offer flexibility.

How Virtuelle can help?

Simplify your journey to ASD Essential 8 compliance with Virtuelle. Our experts will assess your systems and provide actionable recommendations to reduce cyber-attack risks and ensure long-term compliance.  

Contact us today to discuss a plan for meeting the Essential 8 requirements. 

Organisations rely on more systems, and carry out more activities, than ever before. However, any system or activity could be unintentionally exposing your organisation to a heightened level of cyber risk.

A Cyber Security Risk Assessment is designed to identify potential cyber risks, whilst providing management with clear guidance around mitigating those risks.

In this blog, we explore the benefits of conducting an assessment, especially when a new system or activity is being planned, and how this differs from a Technical Assessment.

What is a Cyber Security Risk Assessment?

A Cyber Security Risk Assessment is a process that involves identifying, analysing, and evaluating potential risks to an organisation’s information assets. These risks may emerge from systems the organisation has in its digital environment, or from various activities the organisation undertakes.

The goal is to understand the potential business impact of the risks being assessed and to develop strategies for mitigating or managing them effectively.

The assessment aims to ensure management make informed business decisions, and do not inadvertently expose the organisation to unnecessary cyber risk.

Identify, analyse, and evaluate potential cyber risks.

Why is it important to conduct an assessment?

Achieving and maintaining cyber resilience isn’t easy. The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving. Each day new threats emerge. Cyber resilience demands that organisations become proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to cyber risk mitigation.

This can only be achieved by ensuring that every system in your digital environment, as well as all policies, processes, and procedures, align with security best practice.

By conducting a risk assessment during the planning stage of any initiative, you will gain a deeper awareness of any potential information security risks that may arise because of the initiative. This will enable you to act pre-emptively to embed security controls into the initiative to mitigate those risks.

Regular security assessments are important for building resilience.

How do Cyber Security Risk Assessments differ from Technical Assessments?

Both Cyber Security Risk Assessments and Technical Assessments are crucial. However, they perform different functions within a comprehensive cyber security strategy.

A Cyber Security Risk Assessment is a broad evaluation of a particular system or business activity. It aims to identify and analyse potential information security risks that may emerge from that system or activity. In other words, the focus of the Cyber Security Risk Assessment is on the potential business impact to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your organisation’s data.

In contrast, a Technical Assessment is a more specific evaluation that focuses on the security implications of a particular system that already exists in your environment or is being considered by your organisation. A Technical Assessment focuses on security controls, configurations, and potential technical vulnerabilities in systems, networks, applications, and devices.

Some of the major differences between a Cyber Security Risk Assessment and a Technical Assessment include:

When should you undertake a Cyber Security Risk Assessment?

An assessment should be conducted whenever your organisation is considering adopting a new system, or you’re implementing a significant new business activity that involves changes to policies, processes, and procedures.

Moreover, legislative requirements and industry regulations often mandate Cyber Security Risk Assessments. Organisations need to ensure their practices align with a range of compliance standards, such as Essential 8, ISO 27001 and NIST.

How Virtuelle can help?

When you engage Virtuelle to conduct a Cyber Security Risk Assessment, our team of cyber security experts will objectively assess your organisation’s systems and activities to identify and analyse potential cyber risks. We work with you to understand how your practices may impact the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your information assets, with implementable recommendations to mitigate those risks.

Contact us today and learn how a Cyber Security Risk Assessment by Virtuelle Security can help protect your organisation.

Cyber risk should be on every business executives’ radar as it directly affects the financial well-being of an organisation. Proactive management of cyber risk is essential to protect assets, maintain financial stability, and uphold the trust of stakeholders.

But what is cyber risk? And how is it different from a cyber threat? When thinking about cyber security, it’s important to be clear about the difference between the two terms.

A criminal hacking into your computer systems is a cyber threat. However, if that criminal steals your customer database, that poses a major cyber risk. After all, losing your customer database could harm revenue, incur major losses through compensation or lawsuits, damage business reputation, or incur fines from regulators. In other words, cyber risks are the real-world consequences for your organisation that result from a cyber threat occurring.

If a cyber threat occurs, some of the real-world consequences your organisation is likely to be face include:

Financial risks:

Cyber-attacks can lead to significant financial losses, ranging from immediate remediation costs to long-term consequences such as legal liabilities, regulatory penalties, and potential impacts on shareholder value. Recognising cyber risk as a component of business risk allows for a comprehensive assessment of financial exposure.

Operational risks:

Most business now operate in an interconnected digital landscape. Any disruption caused by a cyber-attack can cripple essential business operations. Considering cyber risk as integral to business risk ensures that business leaders appreciate the potential for operational disruptions, so they can implement resilience measures to mitigate such risks.

Reputational risks:

Cyber security breaches can tarnish an organisation’s reputation, eroding customer trust and loyalty. Understanding cyber risk as part of the broader business risk landscape prompts strategic efforts to safeguard brand integrity, customer relationships, and market standing. This can protect the way your business is perceived by a range of stakeholders, including customers, employees, the general public, investors, and others.

Regulatory/compliance risks:

Businesses operate in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. They face increasing obligations to secure sensitive data. Failing to address cyber risk can result in non-compliance, exposing organisations to legal consequences, including regulatory fines. Directors and senior executives can also be held personally accountable if they are found to be negligent in fulfilling their responsibilities to safeguard the company from a range of risks. Viewing cyber risk as business risk aligns risk management practices with regulatory requirements.

Strategic risks:

Cyber incidents have far-reaching implications on strategic decision-making. Business executives, as key strategists, need to factor in cyber risk when formulating business plans to ensure the resilience and adaptability of the organisation in the face of evolving cyber threats.

When the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently announced that the CFO of SolarWinds faced potential civil enforcement action following a major cyber-attack, the message was clear: CFOs could face being held personally accountable following a cyber breach.

No longer would it be possible for CFOs to delegate all responsibility for cyber security oversight to their company’s CTO or CISO. From now on, cyber security would have to be on every CFO’s radar.

In this blog, we explore why CFOs could be ideally placed to help organisations mitigate the real-world effects of cyber risk.

CFOs: It’s time to start seeing cyber risk as business risk.

As a seasoned finance executive, you are conditioned to be on the lookout for potential threats that pose a risk to your organisation. A business risk could emerge from any external or internal factors that threaten to minimise your business’ gains or maximise your business’ losses.

The key to good risk management is identifying which threats could pose the greatest harm to your business, whilst also being the most likely to occur. This allows you to prioritise a wide range of potential threats, before systematically implementing controls that reduce the likelihood of those threats occurring – a process known as risk mitigation.

Of course, it’s impossible to reduce risk down to zero. There will always be a small chance that some threats will occur, despite having controls in place, and these will negatively impact your business. This is known as residual risk. You need to determine the level of residual risk your organisation is comfortable living with – and, where appropriate, take-out insurance policies that will help you cope with those risks if those threats do end up occurring.

But, while CFOs have long been leading advocates for reducing organisational risk, there has, until now, been one blind spot: cyber risk.

For a variety of reasons, there has been a tendency for CFOs to take a back seat when it comes to managing cyber risk, preferring to leave this matter to their company’s CTO or CISO. This tendency may stem from a sense among many CFOs that cyber risk is technically complex, and thus should be left to those who have a deeper understanding of that technical complexity.

Whatever the reason, times are now changing. CFOs increasingly understand that cyber risk can pose an existential challenge to their organisation. In navigating this evolving landscape, CFOs can seek the help of an external cyber security company with the right expertise to help them understand cyber risk in the context of their business and ensure sufficient resources are allocated to mitigating those risks down to a level the organisation is comfortable living with.

It’s time to start seeing cyber risk as business risk.

CFOs can lead the way in reducing cyber risk.

Many organisations have sought to minimise cyber risk by aligning to maturity-based frameworks, such as the NIST Cyber Security Framework. Such frameworks focus on strengthening cyber security maturity by building your organisation’s capabilities over time.

For example, such frameworks might advocate developing appropriate governance structures, implementing identity and access management controls, and putting Multi-Factor Authentication in place.

Whilst each of these capabilities will help strengthen cyber resilience, implementing them all can be a burden for an organisation with limited resources. Such frameworks also do not take into account the fact that each organisation is different and may face a unique set of cyber threats. Lavish adherence to such frameworks could mean that organisations focus on implementing cyber capabilities that are expensive and time-consuming, whilst doing little to quickly address the most severe cyber threats the organisation faces.

For these reasons, leveraging the expertise of a cyber security services provider can help an organisation embrace a risk-based approach to strengthening their cyber security.

A risk-based approach assesses the unique circumstances of your organisation. It examines the cyber threats that present the greatest risk to your organisation, whilst taking into consideration the likelihood that such threats will occur. It then enables business leaders to allocate limited resources to implementing controls that will reduce those threats that are assessed as being most critical.

CFOs, who are often experienced in assessing and mitigating non-cyber risk, can also play a vital role when it comes to cyber risk. With the right support, CFOs are uniquely placed to help guide their organisation in applying a risk-based approach to reduce cyber risk.

CFOs are on the frontline of cyber risk

A cyber security service provider can help.

It’s important to start thinking about cyber risk as another form of business risk. This paves the way for your organisation to embrace a risk-based approach to cyber security.

CFOs can use their experience in risk management to help shape the thinking of their organisation’s board and leadership team, including the CTO and CISO. CFOs can demonstrate that a risk-based approach is ideal for ensuring limited resources are allocated to the most critical threats your business faces.

When it comes to conducting effective cyber risk assessments, having a team with deep cyber security knowledge is essential. That’s why many organisations turn to cyber security service provider, Virtuelle Security, for a helping hand.

Our highly trained Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) team can guide you in all aspects of cyber risk assessment and remediation. We work with your existing cyber security team to ensure risks are accurately assessed, so you can prioritise resource allocation and control implementation.

Contact us today for a FREE consultation with Robert Kirtley, our Cyber Security Director, and learn how Virtuelle Security stands ready to help you efficiently remediate cyber risk.

Ok, we need to have a chat about vulnerability remediation.

You’ve just had the experts in to complete a vulnerability scan or penetration test. Once again, they’ve produced a detailed report containing lists of vulnerabilities that need remediating across your network.

But this isn’t news to you.

You recognise most of the vulnerabilities they have identified. They keep cropping up in every report.

We get it – remediating all these vulnerabilities is difficult and time consuming. Patching takes time. Your IT team is already busy with a backlog of BAU tasks. But you’ve been kicking this can down the road for far too long. You know the day is coming when a cyber-criminal will exploit one of these vulnerabilities and compromise your systems.

You have a choice. Do nothing and hope for the best. Or you can finally remediate your ever-expanding list of vulnerabilities.

The choice is yours.

In this article, we explore the importance of cyber remediation in a timely manner. When it comes to cyber risk remediation, fixing vulnerabilities is often the lowest hanging fruit.

It’s no exaggeration to say that cyber security remediation gives you the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to strengthening your cyber resilience.

Prioritising Vulnerability Remediation

1- Why is vulnerability remediation important?
2- What are the risks if you don’t promptly remediate vulnerabilities?
3- Case example: Delayed patching disrupts Australian trade
4- How quickly should I remediate vulnerabilities?
5- Taking 3 essential steps towards vulnerability remediation
6- Benefits of vulnerability remediation
7- Vulnerability remediation: A cost-effective way to boost cyber resilience
8- How Virtuelle Security can help

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Why is vulnerability remediation important?

Whenever a vulnerability is identified in any of the systems in your environment, you have three potential courses of action:

1- Ideally, the system developer, such as the software vendor, would issue a patch quickly, allowing you to roll it out and fix the vulnerability.

2- Sometimes, system developers don’t develop a patch quickly. The development of the patch may take a considerable amount of time, or the developer may simply be negligent. Either way, in such cases you should implement compensating controls. These are other steps you can take to remediate the risk of the vulnerability. For example, you may opt to take the system offline to prevent an attacker exploiting it.

3- You can do nothing and accept the risk. Generally speaking, this is not a good idea, unless you are confident that an exploit of the vulnerability would not significantly harm your organisation.

Ultimately, it is up to your organisation to decide the best course of action whenever a vulnerability is identified. Just remember, the ‘do nothing’ option can be very risky. That’s why it is important to remediate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.

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What are the risks if I don’t promptly remediate vulnerabilities?

The recent annual Cyber Threat Report from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) makes clear that inadequate patching is a major factor that enables cyber-crime.

In fact, the report points out that system developers, such as software vendors, are often quick to develop patches after vulnerabilities are discovered, often within two weeks. Despite this, in many cases, organisations either neglect or delay the roll-out of these patches. In over 50 per cent of cases, vulnerabilities are exploited more than two weeks after a patch has been made available – which highlights the importance of patching promptly!

In one recent case, the ACSC observed that cyber criminals successfully exploited a vulnerability in a system, despite a patch being available to remediate that vulnerability for over 7 years!

Such neglect and delay highlight the long tail risks associated with unpatched systems.

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How quickly should I remediate vulnerabilities?

In many cases, a system developer, such as a software vendor, will publicly disclose the discovery of a vulnerability in an internet-facing system at the same time as it issues a patch to fix that vulnerability. The discovery of vulnerabilities should not be publicly disclosed before a patch is made available, to avoid making cyber-criminals aware that the vulnerability exists.

In such cases, the ACSC advises organisations to roll-out patches within 48 hours if the vulnerability is assessed as critical. Even if the vulnerability in question is not deemed critical, patches should be rolled-out within 2 weeks.

Sometimes, news of a vulnerability becomes common knowledge before a patch is developed.

This can leave organisations dangerously exposed, as cyber-criminals will actively look for ways to exploit the vulnerability. In such cases, it may be necessary to implement compensating controls, such as taking systems offline, strengthening access controls, enforcing network separation, and close monitoring for anomalous activity until the patch is made available.

If your organisation lacks the technical skills to roll-out patches in a timely manner, it may be worth considering using the services of a reputable cyber security company that can help ensure timely patching.

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Take 3 essential steps towards vulnerability remediation:

Step 1: Prioritise

Not all vulnerabilities represent an equal risk to your organisation. For example, whenever a penetration test is run in your environment, you should receive a list of identified vulnerabilities that is prioritised according to criticality.

It is important that vulnerabilities are assessed against the risk they pose to your systems or data. An IT security audit can help quantify the risk posed by a vulnerability in an IT asset that contains your most valuable data. This risk will be significantly higher than a vulnerability in an IT asset that does not contain important information, is rarely used, and is not connected to any of your other systems.

Prioritising vulnerabilities in this way allows you to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities first and ensure you are taking urgent steps to remediate them.

Step 2: Test

Once you have completed your cyber security audit and prioritised your vulnerabilities, it is important to run patches in a test environment, before rolling them out to your live production environment.

This is due to the fact that patches are making changes to the source code of the system being patched. Sometimes, patches can have unintended consequences. They may require systems be taken offline for a period of time. By initially testing the impact of a patch within a test environment, you can limit the risk of unforeseen consequences.

Step 3: Roll out

Once you have prioritised the assets that need patching, and you have tested the patches thoroughly, it is time to roll them out to your live production environment.

You may wish to consider rolling-out patches overnight, so that any unexpected downtime will have little impact on your operations.

Whilst critical patches should be rolled-out within 48 hours, it may worth considering scheduling a specific time each fortnight to roll-out batches of patches for non-critical vulnerabilities.

Either way, make sure you keep a close eye on your systems after a patch has been rolled-out to ensure there are no unforeseen problems. Ensure leaders in your organisation are made aware of patching activity, so they can let you know of any problems they may experience following the roll-out.

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What are the benefits of vulnerability remediation?

There are numerous benefits associated with effective and timely vulnerability remediation, including:

Strengthened security: Vulnerabilities can leave your organisation exposed to a range of risks. By remediating them as quickly as possible, you reduce your exposure to those risks, resulting in a strengthened security posture.

Improved reputation: Customers, shareholders, as well as other stakeholders, all expect organisations to take security seriously. The costs of a major security breach can be astronomical, resulting in widespread harm. By demonstrating that your organisation has a mature vulnerability remediation strategy in place, others will have a greater level of confidence and trust in your organisation.

Regulatory compliance: The regulatory landscape is increasingly complex. A range of rules and standards, such as the Essential 8 Cyber Security standard, are in place for different organisations, across different sectors of the economy. With a mature vulnerability remediation strategy in place, you can demonstrate to regulators that you are following best practice when it comes to cyber security.

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Vulnerability remediation: A cost-effective way to boost resilience.

They say prevention is often cheaper than a cure. When it comes to vulnerability remediation, it is the ultimate preventative strategy.

By identifying where security vulnerabilities exist in your organisation and taking proactive steps to fix them, you are limiting the opportunities for attackers to exploit those vulnerabilities and cause you harm. In the long-run, vulnerability remediation is far more cost-effective than dealing with the fallout of a major security incident.

A large-scale cyber-attack can result in damaged hardware, stolen data, disruption to business operations, costly incident response, reputational damage, lawsuits by disgruntled customers, as well as fines by regulators. The costs add up very quickly.

Weighed against these costs, a comprehensive vulnerability remediation strategy makes a great deal of business sense.

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How can Virtuelle Group help?

In complex digital environments, where you have large numbers of assets, vulnerability remediation can be a significant challenge. It can be a race against the clock to make sure you identify and remediate vulnerabilities before attackers are able to exploit them.

This challenge is exacerbated if your IT team is already busy handling ongoing tasks, such as running your service desk.

That’s why many organisations turn to cyber security service provider, Virtuelle Security, for a helping hand.

Our highly trained IT and cyber security team can guide you in all aspects of vulnerability remediation. We work with your existing IT and security teams to augment their capabilities. This ensures you can tap into the resources and skills you require, precisely when you need them.

Contact us today for a FREE Cyber Security Strategy Consultation with Robert Kirtley, our Cyber Security Director, and learn how Virtuelle Group stands ready to help you remediate vulnerabilities effectively and promptly.