Understanding Cybersecurity Risk Assessments and Product Security

Why is cybersecurity important?

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One of the best examples of this fundamental law comes in cybersecurity: as new tools and technologies emerge to combat cyber attacks, cyber threats only become more complex and evasive. The endless cat-and-mouse game of protecting businesses and products from cyber threats is played out every day across the web at scale.

With the average cost of a data breach near 5 million dollars, cybersecurity can no longer be an afterthought. Keeping your products and business safe from cyber attacks starts at the top: fully integrating cybersecurity risk assessments and product security into your overall defense strategies.

In this article, we’ll cover why cybersecurity risk assessments matter, why you should focus on product security at all stages of development, and how modern attacks happen.

The Role of Cybersecurity Risk Assessments

Cybersecurity risk assessments identify, evaluate, and prioritize potential threats to or vulnerabilities in an organization’s information systems, to mitigate risks and enhance security measures. The process attempts to answer one simple question: How can a potential attacker threaten my organization? A cybersecurity risk assessment involves a few key steps:

1. Identify Assets & Vulnerabilities

First, you need to understand the entire potential attack surface, as strong cybersecurity needs to cover all possible entry points. 

1. Build an inventory of all IT assets, from hardware and software to data and networks.
2. Identify the most critical assets, and classify everything based on its relative value and importance in the context of the organization.
3. Visualizing how these assets interact and connect with a network architecture diagram will give you some insight into potential entry points.
4. Identify vulnerabilities and threats. Vulnerabilities tend to come from within, and include things like weak passwords or outdated systems. Threats are more external, including malware, phishing, and natural disasters.

2. Evaluate Threat Likelihood & Potential Impact

Once you have an idea of your entire network architecture and its potential weaknesses, you need to analyze the threats themselves and how they would impact your organization.

1. Analyze each risk to evaluate how likely it is to take advantage of a given vulnerability, and include information on the potential impacts to your organization.
2. Prioritize risks based on their likelihood and impact so you know which ones to deal with first.
3. Calculate the probability of an attack, as well as its impacts on your data’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
4. Translate each risk assessment in terms of monetary losses, recovery costs, fines, and reputational harm.

3. Prioritize Risks for Mitigation

With all the information you’ve gathered so far, the final key step is prioritizing risk mitigations.

1. Use cost-benefit analysis to prioritize risks, based on their potential impact on the organization’s budget.
2. Develop security controls and preventative measures to address risks. These can be technical (firewalls, encryption, etc.) or nontechnical (policies, physical security, etc.), and should be carefully configured and integrated.
3. Conduct regular audits to verify the effectiveness of the implemented controls and measures.

What are the benefits of performing a cybersecurity risk assessment?

Performing a cybersecurity risk assessment is the key to identifying potential threats and taking measures to mitigate them, which will only protect your business in the long run. In addition, as cyber threats continue to evolve at breakneck speed, your organization will know how to assess and develop protections against them continuously.

In the long run, performing a cybersecurity risk assessment: 

• Saves you time. Security incidents often cause downtime or other disruptions to normal operations, and proactively protecting your business from threats saves time compared to reacting to cyberattacks as they happen.
• Saves you money. Understanding and mitigating your business’s cyber threats means less money lost to costly attacks, like DDoS, fraud, and data breaches. You are also less likely to pay fines for failing to comply with data protection regulations like GDPR.
• It saves your reputation. Customers are upset when their personal data is threatened or stolen. Data breaches negatively impact a business’s reputation, causing customer trust to be lost that may never be regained.

Understanding Product Security

Product security involves protecting software and hardware products from threats throughout their life cycles. Today’s products are often complex, made up of interconnected APIs, cloud infrastructure, and potential attack surfaces, and keeping products secure involves nearly every team in a company. 

What are common product vulnerabilities?

Most common product vulnerabilities fall into one of three categories: insecure coding, supply chain risks, and unpatched components.

• Insecure coding: This vulnerability includes things like secrets (API keys, database credentials, etc.) being hardcoded into the product, which can allow malicious actors to gain even greater access to your infrastructure after an initial attack, as well as logic flaws, cloud misconfigurations, insecure policies, and inadequate input validation.
• Supply chain risks: Some attackers are compromising CI/CD pipelines or tampering with third-party dependencies to gain widespread access down the road. Development tools, off-shelf SaaS solutions, and third-party open-source libraries are all potential supply chain threat vectors.
• Unpatched components: Most products involve dependencies, APIs, and integrations with third-party tools—and if a tool contains a vulnerability, so does your product. Ensure all tools are kept updated with the latest patches to address known vulnerabilities.

Product Security Best Practices

Securing your products involves continuously addressing risks and vulnerabilities at every possible stage of development.

• Secure design and development. When in the design phase, implement security practices like gap analysis, threat modeling, and secure coding. Ensure secrets are encrypted and not hardcoded, identify and fix logic flaws, and keep dependencies, APIs, and integrations up-to-date. 
• Conduct regular code reviews and security testing. The code should be reviewed and tested regularly before and after a product is deployed. Penetration and unit testing are ways to identify vulnerabilities before malicious actors do. 
• Implement post-release monitoring and patching. Once your product is released, conduct regular security tests and introduce a bug bounty program to find vulnerabilities first. Ensure the software is patched regularly to fix issues, close attack vectors, and improve security.

The Link Between Weaknesses and Cyber Attacks

Attackers are acutely aware of common product vulnerabilities and weaknesses and know how to target them. Systems with open ports, default configurations, incorrect privileges, no multi-factor authentication, or weak passwords are easy to gain unauthorized access to. Unpatched software can contain known vulnerabilities to exploit.

Along with the security risks inherent in using third-party tools in your supply chain, cyber criminals can attack unprotected products and overlooked risks in more than a few ways.

Examples of Breaches via Product Flaws

One of the more recent examples of a product weakness becoming a devastating cyber attack was the SolarWinds supply chain attack in December 2020, where attackers inserted malicious code into network management software, granting themselves access to numerous organizations’ key systems. Later, in September 2023, the same hackers exploited a vulnerability in JetBrains’ TeamCity servers that could enable remote code execution and administrative control. 

In 2021, private information for 700 million LinkedIn users was gathered via the site’s API and posted on a dark web forum. The October 2023 Okta breach was a third-party supply chain incident that allowed threat actors access to private customer data. The December 2023 breach of National Public Data likely started because an NPD property contained the usernames and passwords for the site administrator in a plain text archive. 

The Cost of Ignoring Proactive Security Measures

IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report showed a 10% year-over-year increase to the average data breach cost for a business. The new 2024 record? 4.88 million. Around 40% of breaches involved distributed data across multiple environments (particularly the cloud), highlighting the complexity of modern data security. However, when businesses implemented automated and proactive security measures, they saved an average of 2.22 million. The data is clear: ignoring proactive security will cost your business big.

Building a Unified Defense Strategy

A unified defense strategy is best to protect your organization’s assets from malicious actors. This involves a few key parts:

1. Integrate risk assessments into product development and maintenance. Assessing and mitigating risks needs to be included at every stage of your product’s life cycle, so you can avoid missing vulnerabilities early on that can grow into massive breaches.
2. Collaborating between security, development, and leadership teams is vital. Because product security and defense against cyber threats should encompass the entire organization and include every product and asset, collaboration throughout the company is vital.
3. Include ongoing threat monitoring and rapid incident response. The only thing worse than a breach is a breach that goes on for weeks unnoticed, feeding the attacker more and more proprietary data. Your unified defense strategy must be ongoing, monitoring for threats constantly, and responding to them immediately.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity is a continuous fight against evolving threats—not a one-time project. Businesses that prioritize cybersecurity risk assessments and product security stand stronger against cyber attacks, and are much less likely to fall victim to breaches that cost millions. Build a unified defense strategy, assessing and mitigating vulnerabilities at every stage of the product life cycle and throughout your entire organization. Schedule a comprehensive risk assessment today and start your next project with security in mind.

Photo by cottonbro studio; Unsplash