With cybersecurity becoming a crucial part of a successful technology development life cycle, it cannot be stressed enough the significance of reporting. For CISOs, reporting is a crucial part of the puzzle, and provides a tangible way for development, security and operations teams to communicate key information about an organization’s security posture. When CISOs and other stakeholders need to understand the security threats that exist along the attack surface of the respective IT ecosystem, they turn to reporting for all the important details.
The role of a CISO is to enforce security and policy across networks, systems, applications, users and devices. In many instances, the CISO is responsible for communicating cybersecurity posture to the board of directors and fellow C-suite colleagues. It is through this information sharing that CISOs and other C-suite stakeholders achieve consensus on critical business decisions. Reporting is a tangible piece of evidence that can help to justify a particular business case to fellow C-suite managers.
Reporting also helps teams to understand potential threats and the requirements that need to be implemented to mitigate the threats. Armed with proper reporting, all business functions involved can understand the cyber risk challenges, plus their responsibilities in building more secure IT systems and applications. Security architects can use reporting, for example, to clearly communicate the security issues they found in a particular software development life cycle to a CISO, and, armed with content as described by respective sources such as OWASP and AWS, justify issue fixes.
What Are the Elements of Good Cybersecurity Reporting?
Good cybersecurity reporting enables stakeholders to clearly understand key factors contributing to cyber risk across the enterprise. It enables CISOs and teams to quantify risk that exists within an organization. Good reporting also enables an organization to measure how aligned it is with risk management and the areas where mitigation needs to occur.
Security reporting is necessary for an organization to stay informed about security issues at all levels. Reporting also needs to inform everyone involved about the security threats that can impact them. Whether it’s a high-level overview needed by the C-suite or a detailed list of action items needed by developers and security architects, a good report will clearly lay out all the data with customized views. Below are other indicators that you have good security reporting in place. Good security reporting:
- Clearly identifies key areas that are at risk of a cyberattack or data breach (attack vectors)
- Sets internal benchmarks describing what is working and areas that need improvement
- Enables you to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand threat impact
Cybersecurity Reporting Benefits From ThreatModeler Automation
Effective cybersecurity reporting should be accurate, consistent, reliable and repeatable. In other words, ad hoc, manual reporting is not the best option. Reporting can be automated to improve on accuracy, consistency and scalability of IT infrastructure covered. That’s where ThreatModeler comes in.
ThreatModeler is powered by its Threat Intelligence Framework, which compiles threat content from leading security resources such as OWASP, CIS, CAPEC and WASC. ThreatModeler automatically analyzes your entire attack surface, identifying the attack vectors that are tied to the components arranged in your architecture. Equipped with a clear understanding of the potential threats involved, teams can make recommendations for threat mitigation based on the impact of each threat and present them to the C-suite level, who will make informed critical decisions about risk.
Cyber threats should not be left to linger if possible. Unaddressed threats can lead to a serious compromise of an organization’s data, which could result in business loss. Otherwise, the four primary ways to manage risk includes: accept, avoid, transfer or mitigate the risk.
Elements of the ThreatModeler Report
The ThreatModeler Report tab provides a full, filterable view of your IT environment’s threat landscape and can be customized for the intended recipient. Currently, there are Developer, Executive and Custom reports, each available at the push of a button. ThreatModeler is able to produce comprehensive reports based on threat model process flow diagrams, which help CISOs to ensure that adequate security controls are in place. With guidance from ThreatModeler, organizations can ensure compliance – both internal and external is adhered to.
ThreatModeler enables you to filter by Threats (including the Top 10), Risk, Status and Task List. Users can also export the report as a PDF. Within certain filter fields, e.g. Threats, you can filter even further based on qualities such as Mitigated, Fixed, Not Tested, etc. A security architect on an agile team, pressed to generate an accurate report to present to stakeholders, can rest more easily knowing that ThreatModeler has provided a holistic view of their IT infrastructure to make informed security decisions.
ThreatModeler Arms You With All You Need to Manage Risk
ThreatModeler is ideal for tool consolidation in that, through automation, it provides you with threat data for analysis, problem solving and decision making. Threat modeling, formerly a manual, ad hoc approach, is improved through automation. Even a person with little-to-no technical ability can create a threat model efficiently, in under an hour. With its CI/CD toolchain integration, users can rely on Jira, an IT ticketing solution, to prevent threats by assigning tasks to relevant teams. Due to its bidirectional integration, users keep up-to-date whenever progress is made, or lack thereof.
Cyber risk management now becomes more inclusive of the C-suite. From an operational standpoint, non-technical stakeholders will have an easier time understanding their organization’s security posture, make go/ no go decisions and contribute more effectively. Once ThreatModeler ROI manifests, executive stakeholders can obtain more buy-in to improve and enhance cybersecurity initiatives.
ThreatModeler offers effective reporting functionality that can be used across the organization. To learn more about how ThreatModeler™ can help your organization build a scalable threat modeling process, book a demo to speak to a ThreatModeler expert today.
