Inherent vs. Residual Risks: What Are They and How Can You Prevent Them?
Cyberattacks don’t usually happen by chance; they are the result of unresolved risks. Every active network is vulnerable to threats. Instead of waiting for hackers to discover the loopholes within your system, you may be proactive by evaluating its inherent and residual risks.
Understanding the inherent and residual risks within your network offers key insights into enhancing your security. What are these risks, and how can you prevent them?
What Are Inherent Risks?
Inherent risks are vulnerabilities within your network when you have no security procedures, processes, or policies in place to prevent threats. But technically, it’s possible to’t measure something absent, so it’s more apt to say that inherent risks are the vulnerabilities within your network under its default security settings. Take the doors in your home for instance. If you don’t install locks on them, intruders can easily break in as there’s no obstacle to prevent them from entering your home.
What Are Residual Risks?
Residual risks are vulnerabilities within your system after you implement security measures including procedures, processes, and policies to protect your valuables. Even though you have set up defenses to resist cyber threats and attacks, certain risks could still arise and impact your system.
Residual risks point out that security isn’t a one-off activity. Putting locks on your doors doesn’t guarantee that criminals can’t attack you. They could find ways to either open the locks or break down the doors even if it means going the extra mile to do that.
Inherent and Residual Risks in Cybersecurity
To recap, inherent risks are the risks your system is prone to in the absence of any security defenses, while residual risks are the possible risks within your system even after you implement security measures. You can figure out more differences between these risk categories by their security implications.
Implications of Inherent Risks
The common implications of inherent risks include:
Non-Regulatory Compliance
There are various regulatory standards for protecting user data. As a network owner or administrator, you are under an obligation to comply with these regulations to secure your users' data.
Your network is prone to inherent risks when you don’t create policies that will guide you in upholding the regulatory requirements in your industry. The absence of policies for user engagement will lead to compliance violations which come with sanctions, lawsuits, and penalties.
Data Loss Due to Lack of Security
Effective data protection requires strong and deliberate security controls. Default security settings are hardly enough to resist calculated cyberattacks.
Cybercriminals are always hunting for prey. Inherent risks expose your valuables to these intruders. The absence of strong security makes their job a lot easier as they enter your network and steal your data with little or no obstruction.
Network Breach Due to a Lack of Access Control
Protecting your data boils down to access controls, or monitoring who’s privy to certain information. A common implication of inherent risks is the absence of controls on systems. When you don’t manage access levels among users, anyone can access and compromise your most critical data.
Implications of Residual Risks
Here are some common implications of inherent risks.
Insider Threats
Cyber risks aren’t always external—they could come from users within your network. Even when you have installed security defenses,intentional or accidental actions by insiderscan occur and compromise your network.
Insider threats are part of residual risks as they can bypass the existing security mechanism, especially when that structure focuses on external factors and neglect internal ones.
Malware Attacks
Setting up security on your system doesn’t automatically stop cybercriminals from targeting it. They use unsuspecting techniques such as phishing attacks to make you take actions that will compromise your system with malware.
Malware contains viruses that couldoverride your system’s security, granting the attacker access and control. It’s a residual risk because it could happen even in the presence of strong defenses.
Third-Party Applications
Third-party applications you connect to your system create new windows for attacks despite the defenses you have already installed. These devices increase your attack surfaces, and since you don’t have maximum control of them, there’s a limit to what you can do.
Threat actors would examine open ports within your system to identify the most convenient ones to penetrate and use techniques likeman-in-the-middle attacks to intercept communicationswithout obstructing your operations.
How to Prevent Inherent and Residual Risks
Inherent and residual risks may be different, but they can cause severe damage to your network if you don’t address them on time.
Here’s how to prevent inherent and residual risks for a more secure network.
1. Conduct Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is your ability to identify, evaluate, and quantify the various risks within your network and the impact they have caused or have the potential to cause. This process includes identifying your assets and their exposure levels to cyber threats and attacks.
Having a grasp of your cyber risks helps you identify the best strategies to adopt for risk prevention and mounting security defenses to address the specific risks you have identified in your assessment.
2. Classify Risks Into Categories
Risk classification enables you to establish qualitative and quantitative metrics for your risk assessment. Since you are dealing with inherent and residual risks, you need to outline attributes of both risk types and categorize them accordingly.
In terms of residual risks, you need to put security measures in place instead of leaving the affected areas without any protection. For residual risks, your goal is to create mitigation strategies such as establishing an effective incident response plan to resolve attacks that defile your defenses.
3. Create a Risk Register
Cyber risks are inevitable to a large extent; your action or inaction determines how they impact your system. Your knowledge of the past cyber incidents your system has experienced enhances your ability to manage the present and future risks that may arise.
Look for the cyber incident history in the risk register if one exists. If there’s none, you could create one by collecting as much information as you can gather from any helpful sources.
Your risk register should contain details of the previous cyber risks and the measures that were taken to resolve them. If the measures were effective, you should consider implementing them again. But if they weren’t, you are better off seeking new and effective defense strategies.
4. Standardize Risk Prevention Controls
Resolving cyber risk is most effective when you deploy standard security frameworks such asthe NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO 27001, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Not only are they proven and tested, but they also provide a basis for measurement and automation.
Inherent risks give you a blank slate to enact standard security controls from scratch due to the absence of substantial security. For residual risks, you may improve your current security structure by troubleshooting loopholes with the strategies of the frameworks.
Combat Inherent and Residual Risks With Holistic Cybersecurity
Holistic security should be the core of every security infrastructure. When you address every aspect of your system in your security efforts, you’ll resolve inherent and residual risks in the process.
When you combine the right cybersecurity culture with effective processes and technology, you’ll have the capacity to reduce risks to the barest minimum.
My iPhone does it all, but I still need my dumb phone.
Your phone’s camera app doesn’t show this, so it’s easy to miss.
Not all true crime is about hacking, slashing, and gore.
I gripped my chair the entire time—and then kept thinking about it when the screen turned off.
check that you don’t miss these movies and shows before Netflix removes them.
Flagship price, mid-range phone.
