What is Digital Risk? Definition and Protection Tactics

Digital risk refers to all unexpected consequences that result from digital transformation and disrupt the achievement of business objectives.

When a business scales, its attack surface expands, increasing its exposure to cyber threats. This makes digital risk an unavoidable by-product of digital transformation and the advancement of new technology. Fortunately, digital risk protection strategies have been developed to mitigate digital risk so organizations can continue confidently scaling their operations.

Types of Digital Risk

The provocative complexity of the digital risk landscape can be simplified by dividing risks into different categories. This will help organizations identify the most vulnerable areas of their ecosystems and support highly-targeted risk protection efforts

There are 9 primary categories of digital risk:

1. Cloud Technology - Risks affecting systems, processes, and people. This could arise from technological incompatibilities, errors, and failures.
2. Cybersecurity - Risks relating to unauthorized access to sensitive resources and data breaches. These could include both inherent risks and residual risks.
3. Data Leaks - Data leaks are accidental exposures of private data that could develop into data breaches. As the digital landscape expands, the data lifecycle spins faster, creating more instances of data-in-use, data-in-transit, and data-in-rest. Data security is difficult to maintain under such dynamic conditions, making data leakage unavoidable during digital transformation.
4. Compliance - Non-compliance risks refer to malpractices that breach regulatory compliance standards. Vendor non-compliance could also negatively affect digital risk protection efforts. Many regulatory requirements call for full compliance.
5. Process Automation - Refers to compatibility issues that arise when automation processes are modified or when new processes are introduced (may also impact technology risks).
6. Resilience - Risks that affect the availability of business services after a disruption, such as a server outage or data breach.
7. Data Privacy - Refers to any risk affecting the protection of sensitive data. Such as personally identifiable information, financial information, etc.
8. Third-Party Risk - All risks associated with third-party vendors. These could include ecosystem vulnerabilities, non-compliance, third-party breaches, and intellectual property theft.
9. Workforce Talent - Any talent gaps preventing the achievement of business objectives.

How to Achieve Digital Risk Protection (DRP)

Cyber attacks have the greatest impact across all categories of digital risk. By focusing digital protection efforts on cybersecurity and data leak risks, all other categories of digital risk can be mitigated.

Digital risk protection is an extension of conventional threat intelligence solutions. Both solutions should be deployed parallel to create the most comprehensive threat detection engine.

Threat Intelligence

Threat Intelligence solutions focus on threat prevention and planning. They continuously scan the ecosystem for vulnerabilities and manage remediation efforts for all discovered risks.

The end goal is to strengthen security postures both internally and throughout the vendor network to improve resilience to cyber attack attempts.

Digital Risk Protection

Digital risk protection has a more proactive approach to cybersecurity by detecting threats before they become data breaches.

Digital risk protection efforts monitor for:

• Data leaks on the dark web
• Brand compromise
• Account takeovers (account impersonations)
• Fraud campaigns
• Reputational damage
• Social engineering or phishing attacks

In other words, digital risk protection efforts focus on preventing cyber attacks, and threat intelligence solutions focus on improving security postures to help organizations withstand cyber attack attempts.

To meet all of the above requirements and keep up with an ever-expanding threat landscape, digital risk protection efforts should consist of the following:

• Digital footprinting - To continuously monitor the security state of all exposed assets.
• Remediation workflows - To rapidly mitigate detected threats.
• Threat exposure mitigation - To strengthen ecosystem vulnerabilities.

Organizations with a complex digital landscape will achieve a higher ROI by partnering with a Digital Risk Protection Service (DRPS). For those that prefer to dedicate internal resources to this effort, an effective digital risk management plan should be established.

How to Manage Digital Risk

Effective digital risk management is a cyclical effort between visibility, insights, and remediation, where each quadrant is powered by the data obtained from the preceding quadrant.

Visibility is achieved through digital footprinting to monitor exposed assets. Visibility data is fed through threat intelligence solutions to power insights into the best remediation responses. Digital landscape insights empower the design and deployment of highly-effective remediation responses.

The following steps outline a digital risk management framework with a specific focus on mitigating cybersecurity and data leak risks:

Step 1. Identify All Exposed Assets

Identify all assets exposed to potential unauthorized access. This should include all social media channels and resources housing sensitive data. A digital footprint can be mapped with the assistance of an attack surface monitoring solution.

Critical assets at risk of exposure can include:

• Social media channels
• Critical data (customer data, employee data, health information, financial information, etc.)
• Shadow IT
• Cloud platforms

Step 2. Monitor for Data Leaks

A data leak detection solution can discover any data leaks linked to your organization to provide both visibility and vulnerability insights into this commonly overlooked attack vector.

Cybercriminals are always searching for data leaks to arm their data breach campaigns. By remediating data leaks before cybercriminals discover them, cybersecurity, and therefore all other categories of digital risk, will be protected.

Step 3. Keep Risk and Threat Models Updated

With a digital footprint established, all threat intelligence data can be collected to create a model of your threat landscape. In addition, to improve cyber resiliency, organizations should also consider reviewing their incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery plan to ensure all security teams can respond to all potential cyber risk factors.

Businesses should also update these cyber resiliency plans every time their threat model is refreshed. Best practices suggest that these security policies are reviewed consistently, on at least an annual basis.

Step 4. Secure Access to All Exposed Resources

To protect against reputational damage, privileged accounts and digital assets should be protected from compromise. Rather than only focusing on established cyber defenses around sensitive resources, detection parameters should be broadened to detect and block all unauthorized network access.

This also involves access control for internal usage as well. Controlled privileges allow organizations to prevent unauthorized employees from accessing critical data beyond their job roles, reducing the risk of insider threats as well.

Strategically placed honeytokens will alert organizations to any unauthorized access attempt. Further access to resources can be mitigated with a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), an assume breach mentality and enhanced Privileged Access Management (PAM) security.

Step 5. Keep Vendors Compliant

The risk of non-compliance has both a financial and cybersecurity impact. Non-compliance is linked to poor security efforts, and regulatory fines could range from $14 million to $40 million.

To mitigate the risk of non-compliance, it's not enough to only monitor the internal ecosystems, the entire vendor network needs to be purged of security vulnerabilities. Organizations need to perform their vendor due diligence to ensure that all new and existing third parties in the supply chain are properly evaluated and assessed.

Cybercriminals could breach your organization through vendors with poor security postures. A third-party risk assessment tool will ensure all vendors remain compliant through regulatory-specific risk assessments.

How UpGuard Can Help Secure Your Digital Risks

UpGuard offers real-time data leak detection and attack surface monitoring tools to create a digital risk protection solution focused on mitigating the most critical categories of digital risk - cybersecurity and data leaks.

Using our automated breach and data leak detection software with continuous monitoring services, UpGuard can quickly identify digital risks and help organizations build remediation plans to better secure third-party vendor risks.