Cyber Security Plan (Methods & Metrics)

What is a cyber security plan?

A cyber security plan specifies the security policies, procedures, and controls required to protect an organization against threats and risk. A cyber security plan can also outline the specific steps to take to respond to a breach.

Refining Your Cyber Security Plan with Data and Metrics

A cyber security plan is the centerpiece of any effort to defend against attacks and mitigate risk in IT environments. Cyber security plans cover the strategy, policy, procedures, and technologies your organization will rely on when seeking to heighten cyber risk management and implement successful security programs.

Data and metrics are critical to every cyber security plan. By providing greater visibility into the attack surface and measuring the effectiveness of security controls, data and metrics enable your security leaders to focus resources on addressing the largest areas of risk while benchmarking performance against competitors and peers.

Bitsight provides a suite of cyber security and risk management solutions that help organizations create, measure, and refine effective and efficient cyber security plans. With Bitsight, cyber security risk management teams have the objective, verifiable information they need to confidently make informed decisions and drive data-driven conversations about security and risk.

Developing a Data Breach Response Plan

Determining how an organization will respond to a data breach is an essential part of every cyber security plan. When a breach occurs, have a pre-established data breach response plan enables security leaders to take immediate action to minimize damage to data, reputation, and the bottom line without having to spend time defining ownership and responsibilities.

Data breach response plans are highly customized to the needs of each organization, but there are several tasks that must be included in this kind of cyber security plan for every business.

1. What types of data constitute a data incident? This information is key to knowing when to trigger a data breach response plan. A breach including sensitive data most likely will require activating your incident response plan. Sensitive data may include customer information, company information, user credentials, intellectual property, or data on a vendor’s network. Depending on the type of data that is breached, you may be required to notify customers as part of your response plan.
2. Who is responsible for what during a data breach?. Your data breach response plan should list the people responsible for stopping the breach and remediating damage. A legal team may need to weigh in if customers' protected information was involved. You may need the communications team to help with crisis management and public relations. The HR department may be required to help if employee information was involved. Responding to data breaches of a certain size will likely need to involve C-suite executives.
3. How does the internal escalation process work?. When an employee discovers a potential breach, there must be a concrete plan for how that information gets escalated internally up the chain to different departments that is also agreed upon by everyone involved.
4. How does the external escalation process work?. When should you get help from outside partners and what kind of help might you need? These external resources often include forensic investigation teams or legal resources.

Like every other part of a cyber security plan, a data breach response plan relies on superior metrics. When a breach is detected, Bitsight metrics can help identify where vulnerabilities are present in the network, helping to speed remediation. After remediation, Bitsight cyber risk monitoring tools can help to see if problems in systems have been truly addressed or if vulnerabilities are still present in your network.

Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight is the most widely adopted Security Ratings solution in the world. Bitsight ratings offer a data-driven, dynamic measurement of the cybersecurity performance of an organization and its third-party vendors. Bitsight analyzes vast amounts of externally observable data to produce daily security ratings that range from 250 to 900. The higher the rating, the more effective the company’s security practices the lower the likelihood of a breach.

Bitsight Security Ratings are based on four categories of data – compromised systems, security intelligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. In addition to an overall rating for each company, Bitsight provides data on specific ratings for certain risk factors and individual digital assets.

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the data and metrics security leaders need when crafting a cyber security plan or cyber risk management framework. Bitsight’s data can help to identify risk throughout an organization’s attack surface or vendor ecosystem. Additionally, Bitsight can measure the effectiveness of controls selected to mitigate risk and improve security, and benchmark an organization’s performance against peers and competitors. Ultimately, Bitsight provides the clear, objective, and continuous data that security leaders need to refine their cyber security risk management process.

Benefits for Cyber Security Plans

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform offers a suite of solutions that security leaders can take advantage of when crafting cyber security plans.

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Bitsight helps organizations measurably reduce cyber risk through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting. With Bitsight, security and risk leaders can continuously monitor, measure, and communicate the efficacy of the controls they have in place to keep their organization secure. Bitsight’s metrics enable security leaders to make faster, data-driven decisions about where the biggest risks to the organization exist, and where to direct resources to remediate them.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management. Bitsight provides continuous monitoring capabilities that let third-party risk management teams better track the security performance of vendors without having to sit back and rely on vendors self-reporting their cybersecurity data. Bitsight immediately exposes cyber risk within the supply chain and helps to prioritize resources on remediating the most dangerous issues to measurably reduce cyber risk.
• Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking. With Bitsight, organizations can continuously monitor and assess their security posture and benchmark their performance against industry peers and competitors. Bitsight security ratings provide a continuous, data-driven measure of performance on a wide range of risk factors for a company and its competitors.
• Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. Bitsight enables security leaders to get a handle on risk hidden throughout their entire network landscape, including digital assets in the cloud, subsidiaries, geographies, and the remote workforce. With greater visibility into the attack surface and the risks within it, security teams can discover shadow IT and visualize areas of greatest risk to prioritize remediation.

Why Bitsight is the Security Ratings leader

Founded in 2011, Bitsight transforms how companies manage information security risk. By providing objective, verifiable, and actionable security ratings, Bitsight helps organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and third-party risk management.

Bitsight is trusted by some of the largest organizations and governments to get a clearer picture of their security posture and the posture of their third-party vendors. Over 2,100 customers use Bitsight to monitor 540,000 organizations. Seven of the top 10 largest cyber insurers trust Bitsight, as do 4 of the top 5 investment banks and all of the Big 4 accounting firms. Bitsight is the choice of 20% of the world’s countries and 25% of Fortune 500 companies.

FAQs: What is a cyber security plan?