Here are some common expectations of the CISO:

Develop and Implement Cybersecurity Strategy:

The board expects the CISO to develop a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy aligned with the organization’s goals and risk appetite. This includes assessing the organization’s security posture, identifying vulnerabilities and threats, and developing plans and policies to mitigate risks.

Example Steps of How the CISO Might Build A Solid Cyber Security Strategy:

1. Security Awareness.
2. Risk Prevention.
3. Data Management.
4. Establish Network Security and Access Control.
5. Regularly Monitor and Review Security Measures.

CISOs may need to consider 3 critical elements to gain maximum impact, namely, governance, technology, and operations.

Ensure Compliance with Regulations and Standards

The CISO is responsible for ensuring the organization’s compliance with relevant cybersecurity regulations, industry standards, and best practices. This includes staying updated on changing regulatory requirements and overseeing the implementation of necessary controls to meet compliance obligations.

For instance, to help strengthen the organization’s compliance even further, CISOs may need to undertake these steps to ensure their organization remains compliant. 

1. Conduct Regular Risk Assessments.
2. Create Policies and Procedures for the Organization.
3. Clearly Communicate Roles and Responsibilities.
4. Streamline Processes.
5. Review Policies Regularly.

Risk Management and Assessment

The board expects the CISO to conduct regular risk assessments and establish risk management processes. Risk management is the macro-level process of assessing, analyzing, prioritizing, and making a strategy for mitigating threats and managing risk to an organization’s assets and earnings. Risk assessment is a meso-level process within risk management.

The CISO’s efforts will involve identifying, assessing, and prioritizing cybersecurity risks, as well as implementing controls and mitigation strategies to reduce the organization’s exposure to cyber threats.

Incident Response Planning and Execution

The CISO plays a crucial role in developing and implementing incident response plans to effectively address and mitigate cybersecurity incidents.

An incident response plan is a document that outlines an organization’s procedures, steps, and responsibilities of its incident response program. Incident response planning often includes the following details: how incident response supports the organization’s broader mission.

An incident response communication plan should address how these groups work together during an active incident and the types of information that should be shared with internal and external responders. The communication plan must also address the involvement of law enforcement.

The board expects the CISO to establish protocols, coordinate response efforts across teams, and lead incident response activities to minimize the impact of security breaches. For instance, The NIST incident response lifecycle breaks incident response down into four main phases: Preparation; Detection and Analysis; Containment, Eradication, and Recovery; and Post-Event Activity.

Security Governance and Policy Development

The CISO is responsible for establishing and maintaining security governance frameworks, policies, and procedures. This includes defining and enforcing security standards, guidelines, and controls throughout the organization to protect critical assets, data, and systems.

Security governance is a process for overseeing the cybersecurity teams who are responsible for mitigating business risks. Security governance leaders make the decisions that allow risks to be prioritized so that security efforts are focused on business priorities rather than their own.

Development and maintenance of Information Security Policies, is an integral part of any Information Security Program. Security policies set the standard for the implementation of all controls associated with managing the risk associated with an organization’s Information Security Plan.

What else does the Board require of the CISO? Stay tuned for Part 2…

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A Hacking Simulation

Penetration testing is a hacking simulation conducted with the purpose to create an event as close as possible to a real attack to test an environment’s cybersecurity posture, and eventually identify solutions to secure it, limiting exposure to threats and attacks.

Pen-testing is a systematic process that utilizes tools and applies ethical hacking techniques to accurately assess the systems’ risks. It is well known that breaches, unless publicized by the attackers, can go undetected for months.

Mandatory

Penetration testing is mandated by regulators in some industries like financial services, health care, and government systems access, while it is optional for many other industries. In today’s ever dangerous cyber universe, penetration testing is an essential information security practice and should be included in an organization’s governance framework.

Penetration testing can be performed by internal testing teams or by using third-party consultants.

One of the longest cyber attacks lasted more than four years, averaging 365 days each.

Source: Mandiant

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Businesses need to regularly scan the external available infrastructure and applications to protect against external threats. They also need to scan internally to protect against insider threat and compromised individuals. The worst situation is to have an exploitable vulnerability within your infrastructure, application or employees, that you are not aware of, as the attackers might be probing your assets for months or years.

Businesses need to conduct regular testing of their IT systems for the following key reasons:

• Adherence to CCPA or GDPR compliance
• Adherence to various industry compliances including HIPAA, HITECH, PCI or ISO 27001
• Ensure you maintain the trust of your customers, partners and markets
• To identify any weakness in the infrastructure (hardware), application (software) and people (social) in order to develop controls
• To ensure security controls have been well implemented and are effective – this provides assurance to information security and senior management
• To test applications that are often the avenues of attack (applications are built by humans who are fallible despite trying to follow best practices in software development)
• To discover new bugs in existing software (patches and updates can fix existing vulnerabilities, but they may inadvertently introduce new vulnerabilities)

When businesses are attacked through social engineering (soft target) the stronger perimeter controls are completely bypassed and less protected internal assets are exposed. The worst situation is to have an exploitable vulnerability within your infrastructure, application or employees, that you are not aware of, as the attackers might be probing your assets for months or years.

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