Cyber threats are on the rise across Asia Pacific, and the potential financial damage keeps growing every year. According to a staggering forecast from the Word Economic Forum, annual cybercrime costs are set to balloon from US$8.4 trillion globally to over US$23 trillion in 2027. And by many accounts, the Asia Pacific region is one of those being hit the hardest. APAC is even being labelled the “new Ground Zero for cybercrime”.
It’s clear businesses today need to take cybersecurity seriously. But where do you start when defending against a threat landscape that evolves every day? How do you even quantify cyber risk to know where to focus your limited resources?
If one thing is for sure, for the companies that keep relying on existing security tactics, it becomes a matter of when (not if) a data breach causes massive disruption. Indeed there has to be a better way versus this non-stop game of catchup?
Current security methods come up short
Today’s common cyber risk approaches leave much to be desired:
- Preventative controls: Tools like traditional firewalls, endpoints, and IPS block some threats but are incomplete protections. You still get flooded with tons of alerts to sift through, trying to find actual incidents.
- Vulnerability management: Typically very manual and reactive. You only fix issues after some scanning tool flags an exposure, allowing months of unseen access in many cases. This band-aid approach just doesn’t cut it at businesses’ current pace.
- Compliance audits: These happen maybe once or twice a year. Auditors follow their own standards, so you get snapshots that are not optimised for business priorities. Technologists hardly ever have input to clarify actual risks, either.
What’s missing is a way to continuously expose and manage both internal authorisation risks alongside emerging external threats. Boardrooms remain in the dark, unable to quantify actual business risk exposures or potential disruption costs. Running blind, organisations miss chances to improve defences before disaster strikes.
Step into the light with threat exposure management
This is where Threat Exposure Management (TEM) comes in. TEM takes a data-driven approach to managing cyber risk enterprise-wide. Simply put, it gives you the ability to:
- Keep watch 24/7 on where assets, data, and access gaps exist
- Detect risk shifts as users, configs, and threats constantly change
- Predict business impact scenarios for smart planning
- Prevent incidents by closing exposures early
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With the right TEM program, you gain an always up-to-date understanding of the distinct cyber risks facing your organisation. Just like advancements in medicine moved from reactive treatment to data-based prevention, TEM ushers in the next evolution of contextual, collaborative cyber defence.
Complete visibility of your dynamic environment
Gaining ongoing visibility into the entirety of your environment is the foundation for successful TEM. You need intimate intelligence on where sensitive assets reside, authorisation gaps exist, and critical data flows. This allows building an effective risk model that reflects reality.
Best-in-class solutions automatically map assets continuously across cloud, hybrid infrastructure, OT, IoT, and more. By stitching visibility seamlessly across technologies, you maintain a single source of truth through automatic updates.
Armed with this complete picture, you can track permission access across dynamic users and roles to expose combo risks. Analysing entitlements and connections illuminates potential attack paths, helping focus defenses on areas of heightened exposure likelihood.
Intelligence tracking of emerging external threats
Understanding exposure potential from approved access (internal threats) tells only part of the story. We also have to account for dynamic external threats from cybercriminals.
Motivated hackers actively scan environments each day, always finding new ways to break in through malware, ransomware, social engineering, and so on. They don’t care if they exploit some zero day vulnerability or a gap caused by one employee’s mistake.
To stay on top of these ever-evolving attack methods, advanced TEM systems continuously track global hacking trends. By ingesting intelligence from security firms and even the dark web, TEM keeps risk models updated based on real-world threats.
For example, analysts receive automatic alerts if chatter about hospital ransomware attacks spikes in Asia. Or new malware targeting manufacturing systems starts spreading. This hands-free monitoring ensures no threat goes unseen.
Rather than chasing thousands of theoretical vulnerabilities, teams can instantly mobilise incident response plans against credible threats mapped to their specific business assets. Staying steps ahead of emerging hacks before they become headlines.
Connecting the dots to business impact
When assessing risk, we tend to fixate on the likelihood of hacking threats or the number of security gaps. But not all assets are created equal for a company. We have to weigh business criticality too. For example, a vulnerability in your social media automation tools matters far less than one exposing customer financial data, right? The potential damage was done by a data breach factors heavily into how we prioritise defences.
Advanced TEM solutions help quantify bigger picture business impact by mapping out these connections:
- Linking assets and systems to key business functions that depend on them
- Modeling realistic disruption scenarios — lost revenue, recovery costs, fines, reputation hit
- Scoring risk by blending both likelihood and impact estimates
Painting this clear picture of how cyber-attacks translate to business disruption gets everyone aligned. IT security focuses on fixing higher value exposures instead of chasing every tiny issue. Leadership joins forces, realising revenue, regulatory mandates, and corporate reputation are all on the line.
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Because at the end of the day, informed risk decisions require seeing the forest for the trees – and TEM helps connect those dots between cyber risk and business impact.
Enabling risk-aware planning across the business
With constantly updated data on cyber risks and business impacts, the big win is enabling collaboration across your whole organisation.
- IT Security quickly spots gaps allowing hackers access to critical systems. They rally joint priorities to fix issues before damage happens.
- Finance sees forward-looking risk likelihood trends. They can account for cyber threats appropriately in investment planning and budgets.
- Legal and Compliance accurately pinpoints higher exposure areas in most need of audits, policies, and controls. Resources get allocated judiciously.
- Insurance moves from subjective questionnaires to fact-based assessments quantifying cyber risk. It helps justify policy premiums and limits through data-driven models.
By breaking down information silos, TEM gives every stakeholder shared visibility. Teams plan cyber defense strategies aware of risks based on data-backed projections – not gut feeling guesswork after major incidents strike.
Final thoughts
Playing defence against cyber threats isn’t working with how fast attacks evolve nowadays. Compliance checklists and legacy tools leave too many gaps bad actors exploit before we can even react. Businesses need to flip the script to quantify risks proactively and prevent incidents through cross-team collaboration.
That’s the power of threat exposure management. TEM gives you 24/7 visibility across your entire environment — critical for exposing authorisation risks and tracking emerging hacking threats targeting organisations like yours. With security and business leaders planning hand-in-hand armed with data-driven risk insights, you can finally get ahead of threats before they make headlines.
Sure, it takes some work to connect the dots between cyber risk and business impact. But isn’t the long-term resilience of an organisation worth investing in? No one wants to gamble on when (not if) the next data breach happens. TEM allows seeing around corners before disaster strikes so you can thrive.
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