Elements you should be aware of as cybersecurity analysts are threats, controls, assets, exploits, attacks, and vulnerabilities. Assets are anything of value to the company, threats are anything that can cause damage to an asset like cyber attackers or insiders making mistakes, attack is an action or event that attempts to take down a security measure in place, vulnerabilities are anything that can be taken advantage of by threats to bypass security and something that leaves assets open to harm, exploit is a technique that takes advantage of a vulnerability to perform an attack, and control is a countermeasure that’s in place to prevent or mitigate threats.
Security analysts would need prioritize their organization’s assets to ensure critical assets get protected first. There are limited resources, so those resources will need to be allocated to the most important assets. The risk is equal to threats times vulnerabilities times consequences. Risk management is simply determining how to deal with various risks. For example, a server with customer’s critical information like credit card numbers and addresses is more important than a employee’s laptop with historical funding data regarding a outdated program. There will be more threats for valuable server with customer’s information compared to a employee’s laptop with historical data.
Let’s review the elements. We have a hacker or the threat that installs malware or conducts an attack using the backdoor that resulted from misconfiguration or vulnerability on the customer’s database server or the asset. The control or firewall that was in place was unable to prevent this and have resulted in not only data being stolen but data not being available for operational use, so the company couldn’t conduct business transactions. This not only causes people to lose confidence and embarrasses the company, it loses them lot of money. It will have both technical and business impacts.
Security analysts will be working with leadership to aid in decision making regarding risk management. You will need to be able to bring technical expertise into the discussion that they may not be aware of. Risk management is a cyclical process and you will conduct it on a continuous basis. You will identify, assess, analyze, and respond to risks on a quarterly basis in most organization.
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