Cyber security reports are an invaluable tool for keeping stakeholders and senior management informed about your cyber security efforts. This post outlines examples of some of the most popular reporting styles, with a particular focus on a field of cybersecurity drawing increasing interest among executive teams - Vendor Risk Management.
Each of the cyber security report examples in this list have been pulled from the UpGuard platform - learn more about UpGuard’s reporting features.
1. Board Summary Report
The board summary report is a high-level overview of the key factors and KPIs impacting your organization’s overall security posture.
Why is this report useful?
A board summary report is useful for proving the board with quick updates of an organization’s cybersecurity efforts. This report template is a ideal for the board because it offers the minimal level of detail required to understand an organization’s overall cyber risk exposure, making it easy to understand even for those with little technical knowledge.
What features are included in a board summary report for cybersecurity?
An ideal board summary report template should include the following details.
(i). Overall security rating overview
Security ratings are the most convenient method of summarising an organization’s security posture. Drawing upon the same principle as credit card scoring, security ratings represent an organization’s overall “cybersecurity health”, quantified as either a numerical value (ranging from 0-950) or a letter grade (ranging from A-F). These calculations are made by considering multiple attack vectors across commonly exploited attack surfaces - to learn more about this process, refer to this explanation of how UpGuard calculates its security ratings.
Like credit scores, the higher an organization’s secuirty ratings, the less its potential of experiencing a cyber security incident.
By also including a high-level breakdown of security ratings across primary attack vector categories, board members will have visibility in the specific regions of the company’s attack surface most likely to facilitate a breach from a cyberattack, highlighting the sensitive regions of the company's first line of cyber defenses.
Here’s an example of a security ratings overview from a board summary report on the UpGuard platform. The entity in this example and its associated insights are fabricated for illustrative purposes.
Security ratings are broken down into five attack vector categories - website security, email security, network security, phishing and malware, and brand & reputation. This snapshot also benchmarks the company’s security rating performance across its main competitors. Such key findings could help the board gauge the organization’s potential of closing new high-value relationships over its competitors.
With data breach risks now the primary concern of all scaling strategies, an overview of cyber risk profies is becoming a primary focus of due diligence efforts. And with speed being a critical metric of scalability, potential business partners are more likely to leverage security ratings tools to efficienctly evaulate risk appetite alignement.
In this example, the organization has a relatively low potential of vulnerabilities in information technology being exploited in a phishing attack. However, security measures need to be tightened in the area of email security, which could trigger mitigation efforts such a reviewing security controls and security policies for information security frameworks, such as NIST CSF, or ISO 27001.
(ii). Security rating changes over time
A security rating overview provides the board with a point-in-time reference for the organization’s security posture performance. To indicate whether the initiatives of your cyber security strategy are improving the strength of your security program over time, a board summary report should also include a trajectory of security posture changes over the last 12 months.
(iii). Vendor risk overview
With cybercriminals increasingly targeting third-party vendors, the board will expect to see an overview of the company’s third-party risk exposure, even in an executive summary.
The most convenient and efficient method of summarizing third-party cybersecurity threat exposure for your entire service provider network is with a graphical vendor risk matrix, measuring security rating distribution across three tiers of vendor criticality, ranging from low impact to high impact.
The inclusion of a vendor cybersecurity risk overview is crucial for effective cybersecurity decision-making at the executive level.
Typically, vendors with the highest potential impact on an organizaiton should they suffer a ransomware attack or data breach would be grouped in the most critical tier, where degree of impact is determined by whether the vendor requires access to sensitive data.
By offering the board a concise snapshot of risk exposure across your critical vendor segment, discussions about preventive measures are focused on remediation strategies with the most significant positive financial impact, keeping board meetings value-focused and efficient.
At the ground level, a vendor tiering strategy is greatly beneficial to security teams, simplifying cyber risk remediation prioritization in incident response and risk assessment processes.
2. Vendor risk assessment report
A vendor risk assessment report summarises the key risk exposure findings of a completed vendor risk assessment.
Why is this report useful?
For newly onboarded vendors, a risk assessment report outlines the framework for the vendor’s risk management strategy. For existing vendors, this report allows senior management to track the efficiency of an implemented risk management strategy. With a growing number of regulators expecting Third-Party Risk Management oversight from executive teams, such reports are an invaluable aid for maintaining awareness of a company’s third-party threat landscape.
What features are included in a vendor risk assessment report for cybersecurity?
Because they cover such a wide range of third-party security risk insights in detail, vendor risk assessments are quite lengthy. For the sake of brevity, only a few of the main features of a vendor risk assessment report are covered below.
For an overview of UpGuard’s new and improved vendor risk assessment reporting template, watch this video.
To start evaluating vendor cyber risks, download your free cybersecurity risk assessment template.
(i). Security ratings by category
if your cybersecurity program has integrated security rating technology into its risk exposure tracking processes, the inclusion of a breakdown of security ratings across all monitored attack vector categories will serve as a convenient summary of the findings of the risk assessment.
In this example, the vendor’s overall security risk rating is primarily affected by cyber risks detected from questionnaire responses.
(ii). Remediation summary
A summary of all primary remediation tasks in the pipeline.
(iii). Risk category breakdown
A detailed breakdown of all the cyber risks associated with all of the attack vector categories this risk assessment is mapping to. In this example report template from the UpGuard platform, a breakdown is included for six risk categories:
- Questionnaire Risks
- Website Security
- Email Security
- Network Security
- Phishing & Malware
- Brand & Reputation Risk
Here’s a snapshot of a risk breakdown for just the Questionnaire risk category:
3. Company attack surface report
A company’s attack surface report, referred to as a BreachSight report on the UpGuard platform, provides an overview of the key factors impacting an organization's cybersecurity posture.
Why is this report useful?
An attack surface report is useful for tracking an organization’s internal cybersecurity efforts.
What features are included in a board summary report for cybersecurity?
The following features contribute towards a set of cybersecurity insights that are most valuable for keeping senior management informed of the company’s internal cybersecurity performance.
Note: These are just a few of the details included in UpGuard’s breach report, for more comprehensive view of the report, request a free trial of UpGuard.
(i). Competitor analysis
An overview of the company’s security posture performance against its main competitors. Tracking this metric will help senior management evaluate the company’s overall cybersecurity reputation and the likelyhood of winning new partnerships over its competitors.
A snapshot of a security posture benchmarking feature in an example Breachsight report from the UpGuard platform.
(ii). Security rating changes over time across primary attack vector categories
To provide deeper insights into the organization's general cybersecurity performance improvement trend, this report should include an overview of security rating changes over time for all primary cyber risk categories.
Here’s an example of security posture performance in the website security category for the past 12 months.
(iii). Cyber security risk breakdown
To provide a deeper level of insights into security posture trajectories outlined in the previous point, these reports should include a list of detected threats in each risk category, ranked by level of criticality.
Here’s an example for the Network Security category.
Cyber security reporting By UpGuard
The UpGuard platform includes a library of customization cyber security reports to support its end-to-end Vendor Risk Management workflow. With the addition of features streamlining common reporting bottlenecks, such as the ability to export board summary reports into editable PowerPoint presentations, UpGuard removes the stress of keeping stakeholders informed of critical cybersecurity insights.
