What Is a Cybersecurity Posture?

Cybersecurity posture refers to an organization’s overall security strength, measured by its exposure to potential cybersecurity risks. Effectively measuring an organization’s cybersecurity posture means assessing how prepared it is to respond to a cyberattack.

Effectively gauging your cybersecurity posture comes down to the following:

Inventory: take a complete inventory of your assets that could be exposed to cyberattacks and their respective attack surfaces

Detection and Resilience: the defenses your organization has in place to identify and defend against incoming cyberattacks

Response and Recovery: the steps your organization will follow in the event an attack is successful

Most organizations have thousands of potential attack points that could be vulnerable and exposed to cyberattacks—most organizations are more exposed than they think they are.

Categories of Cybersecurity Posture

There are five primary categories of your organization’s cybersecurity posture.

Application Security, the risk of your enterprise as it relates to code, container, and open-source vulnerabilities
Cloud Security, the risk your enterprise faces regarding the procedures that protect your data in cloud-based systems
Data Security, the risk your enterprise faces regarding data governance concerning the proper security and encryption of both organizational and customer data
Device Security, the risks concerning the vulnerabilities of any devices used by your organization or employees
Network Security, the risk your enterprise faces regarding your network device configurations; firewalls are often your first layer of defense

How to Evaluate Cybersecurity Posture (Cybersecurity Posture Assessment)

Accurately evaluating your cybersecurity posture comes down to a few key steps (while keeping the above categories in mind).

Take Inventory

Take inventory of all assets (hardware, software applications, services) or devices connected to your company’s network and, thus, your company’s data. Remember that being aware of all assets and where they are being deployed is a requirement of many cybersecurity compliance standards, such as the PCI and the ISO standards, so your organization should be doing this already.

Determine Vulnerabilities

Determine each attack point of your assets that could be exposed to a cyberattack. If you have thousands of assets, you likely have millions of attack points that must be continuously monitored.

Calculate Risk

Are the vulnerabilities you identified in the previous step exploitable? If so, are they currently being exploited by threat actors? What security controls are in place for each asset? Answering these questions will help you prioritize the actions you must take to mitigate risk.

How to Improve Your Cybersecurity Posture

Now that your cybersecurity posture has been properly evaluated, you can take action to bolster and improve it. To accomplish this, you need to:

Make sure all of your organization’s assets are being continuously monitored in real-time for vulnerabilities
Define your assets based on the level of risk their vulnerabilities pose to your organization; rank these according to an ascending hierarchy
Assign owners who are responsible for the security of each asset based on the hierarchy mentioned above
Have owners monitor vulnerabilities for misconfigurations, unpatched software, old passwords, etc.
Invest in a cybersecurity provider to search for gaps in your security measures and make recommendations as to changes and improvements

Challenges to Improving Cybersecurity Posture

The biggest challenges with improving the robustness of an organization’s cybersecurity posture:

Default, old, or reused passwords
Human error/negligence
Not tracking who has access to systems in your organizations
Phishing attacks
Ransomware attacks
Unencrypted data and communications
Unpatched software

Most organizations need a better understanding of how vulnerable they are to cyberattacks and, subsequently, would be well-served to invest in a cybersecurity consultant to assess their security posture and develop actionable recommendations to improve it.

BlackBerry Services for Cybersecurity Posture Assessments

With proven leadership in some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, BlackBerry is uniquely positioned to assess your threat landscape and help design a complete cybersecurity strategy for your organization.

Whether you have an established cybersecurity approach and need to supplement, or you’re starting to define it, BlackBerry Cybersecurity Consulting can help.

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