Cybersecurity report creation is essential for keeping stakeholders informed of your risk management progress, especially within Third-Party Risk Management, which focuses on a risk domain with the most significant potential of causing a data breach.
What is a cybersecurity report?
A cybersecurity report is a document that overviews critical information about your organization's security posture. These reports are provided to stakeholders and board members to inform them of the organization's state of cybersecurity and level of resilience to external security incidents and emerging cyber threats.
A typical cybersecurity report includes a detailed yet concise breakdown of all factors contributing to an organization's overall cybersecurity posture.
These could include:
- Summary of vendor cybersecurity performance, especially for high-risk vendors with access to sensitive data.
- Third-party risks impacting regulatory compliance.
- An overview of critical security risks discovered in vendor risk assessments and their associated risk treatment plans.
- The organization's cybersecurity performance against industry benchmarks.
- A list of vulnerabilities and cybersecurity risks that increase the organization's potential for suffering a data breach or cybersecurity incident
- Summary of incident response efforts.
- Security control deficiencies that create resilience gaps, new malware, ransomware, and cyber attack tactics
Common types of cybersecurity reports
Some common cybersecurity report examples include:
- Board summary report: A high-level summary of the critical factors contributing to the organization's security posture and how its cybersecurity strategy is tracking against its metrics.
- Vendor risk assessment report: A summary of the primary cybersecurity threats discovered in a vendor's risk assessment, forming a basis for the vendor's risk management plan.
- Company attack surface report: A report of all the primary attack vectors across information technology devices in an organization's digital footprint.
- Penetration testing report: An overview of the findings of a simulated cyber attack, identifying weaknesses in security measures potentially facilitating unauthorized access, ransomware attacks, and phishing attacks.
- Incident reports: A detailed account of information security incidents, including the nature of the attack, impacted systems, and effectiveness of deployed incident response plans.
- Compliance and regulatory reports: A demonstration of the company's adherence to internal security policies and cybersecurity standards regulations, such as NIST CSF, HIPAA, and PCI DSS (compliance reports are also helpful for law enforcement agencies investigating potential compliance violations after a major security incident, such as the CrowdStrike event).
Related: How CISOs should handle future CrowdStrike-type breaches.
These examples of cybersecurity reporting styles could be stand-alone reports or components of a single cybersecurity program report.
Why are cybersecurity reports important?
With growing oversight expectations across stakeholders, regulators, and senior management, cybersecurity reports are an invaluable aid to security teams, streamlining communication of security program performance.
Your security team should integrate a cybersecurity reporting policy for four primary reasons:
1. Cybersecurity reports simplify risk management reporting to the board
Cybersecurity reports are the primary way the board keeps informed of the organization's evolving cyber risk exposure. With recent major disruptions in the service provider threat landscape, senior management now recognizes third-party risk as a fundamental business risk and expects security teams to prioritize Third-Party Risk Management insights in cyber reports.
2. Cybersecurity reports streamline regulatory compliance tracking
The language the board understands with the most clarity is the language of dollars and cents. Even though security risks could result in significant damage costs should they become exploited by cybercriminals, the more significant potential for financial impact stems from compliance violations.
Cybersecurity reports help stakeholders track the key risks impacting the organization's compliance with industry regulations. An ideal cyber reporting template will also consider the impact of third-party risks since this risk category has a significant impact on compliance with strict regulations, such as PCI DSS, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Third-party risk management and regulatory compliance reports help senior management track the return of TPRM solution investments.
3. Cybersecurity reports support strategic decision-making
With regular exposure to cyber reports, the board can make intelligent business decisions that consider the organization's current state of cyber risk exposure, ensuring the company continuously evolves toward greater cyber resilience.
Vendor risk summary cybersecurity reports are especially valuable for supporting secure operational scaling decisions. With the basis of a third-party risk treatment plan produced by a risk assessment report, the board can compare the inherent risk exposure of prospective third-party services against the strategic benefits of onboarding them, thereby securing the vendor onboarding process.
4-step guide: How to write a cybersecurity report
To write an effective cybersecurity report, you'll need to cater these reports to your target audience (stakeholders, board members, and senior management). Creating detailed reports becomes increasingly simple as you understand the following fundamental truths about senior management and board members.
- Truth #1: Senior management will not care about technical risks. They will only care about the financial costs associated with the risk.
- Truth #2: Senior management will only be interested in cybersecurity risks that are important to them.
- Truth #3: Senior management will not understand cybersecurity technical jargon.
Considering these three fundamental truths, the following 4-step framework will help you create a cybersecurity report that your board will appreciate.
Step 1: Understand the cyber risks that matter to the board
The first step of the cyber report creation process is to conduct research to learn which cyber risks your board and senior management staff actually care about. Interview all C-level staff and document all of their primary cyber risk concerns. Ideally, all C-level and senior executive staff should be interviewed to achieve the most diverse profile of the organization's security anxieties.
You can use the following questions as a template for such an interview:
- What are your primary cybersecurity concerns?
- Are you worried about the organization suffering a data breach?
- Are you aware of our current risk of suffering a data breach?
- Do you feel sufficiently informed about your efforts to address your primary cyber risk concerns?
- Are there any security incidents or cyber attack events mentioned in the news that you are concerned about?
- Did you know it's possible to suffer a data breach through a compromised third-party vendor?
- Are you concerned about the security of our third-party vendors?
- Of all the cyber risk concerns you listed, how would you order them from most critical to least critical?
Ideally, you should only need to perform this research process once, as it will define the focus of all future cybersecurity reports.
It is important to note that your cybersecurity report should not be limited to the types of risks the board deems relevant. The majority of the board is likely not familiar with the technical aspects of cybersecurity, and complex zero-day risks will inevitably emerge and require the board's visibility.
After collating your list of primary cybersecurity concerns, quantify their potential financial impact on the business where possible. Doing this will significantly increase the relevance and value of your cybersecurity report to senior management.
Most board members greatly appreciate when security teams make an effort to translate their primary cyber risk concerns into a language the board can understand (i.e. dollars and cents).
This post about cyber risk quantification outlines methodologies for calculating the financial impact of cybersecurity risks.
Step 2: Write an executive summary
An executive summary of a cybersecurity report is a concise overview of the entire report. This section generally covers the following points for a given reporting period:
(i). Cyber risk findings
A summary of all major cyber risks discovered during the reporting period, emphasizing risks deemed important by the board
Here's an example of a cyber risk detection finding item for an executive summary of a cyber report:
"We discovered several third-party services impacted by two zero-day exploits - Log4Shell and Spring4Shell. Remediation actions were promptly deployed by installing the latest security patch issued by the product developers, in addition to bolstering our network security and firewall configurations. No sensitive information was compromised during this exposure, and no other internal systems were impacted."
(ii). Cybersecurity incident summary
A summary of all security events and the effectiveness of respective incident response team efforts
Here's an example of a cybersecurity incident item for an executive summary of a cyber report:
"We discovered that 80% of our critical third-party vendors, those supporting our critical, were impacted by the CrowdStrike IT outage. We used our Vendor Risk Management product to promptly identify and address all areas of our supply chain affected by the incident."
Watch this video to learn how UpGuard helped its customers promptly understand their exposure to the CrowdStrike incident and deploy appropriate mitigation measures.
(iii). Cyber threat summary
A summary of all critical threat intelligence developments that could impact the company
Here's an example of a cyber threat summary item for an executive summary of a cyber report:
"Our incident and news feed has detected a high volume of third-party services impacted by a major data breach. While all of our potentially impacted vendors are classified as "low risk" and don't have access to sensitive information, we have sent security questionnaires to each of them to confirm any impacts.
Thanks to our security questionnaire automation solutions, all questionnaires have been promptly completed, confirming none of our vendors were affected by the event. All security questionnaires have been completed, indicating that none of our vendors were affected by the event."
(iv). Cyber risk mitigation recommendations
Recommendations for addressing cyber risks detected in the reporting period
Here's an example of a cyber threat summary item for an executive summary of a cyber report:
"To mitigate the risk of staff falling victim to a growing trend of phishing attacks, regular security awareness training should be deployed across the organization. In addition, a real-time vendor security posture monitoring solution should be deployed to address the board's concerns about the company being impacted by third-party breaches, especially across all of our critical vendors."
Step 3: Summarize vendor security posture performance
This stage relates to cyber reports about the organization's third-party risk exposure.
To address the board's objection to cybersecurity jargon, this section of a cybersecurity board report should represent the complexities of the organization's evolving third-party risk exposure in an easy-to-understand manner, best achieved with graphical elements.
It's helpful to start at the highest level by indicating the vendor's overall security posture, quantified as a security rating.
Security rating data integrations also allow the board to track the vendor's security posture changes over time, an especially helpful feature for critical vendors.
It's helpful for the board to understand how a vendor's risk posture is distributed across different cyber risk categories. Here's an example of how you could represent this graphically.
A break down of a vendor's security rating by category, snapshot taken from UpGuard's vendor cybersecurity reports.The insights above are typically used in reports delineating cybersecurity performance for a single vendor. Such reports would also include the findings of cyber risks detected from questionnaires and other sources of security performance evidence.
Some board members will request detailed vendor risk assessment reports when they prefer to be involved in the risk treatment planning process for critical vendors. For board members preferring just an overview of the organization's overall third-party risk exposure, including a vendor risk matrix in your cybersecurity report is helpful.
Here's an example of a vendor risk matrix distributing a company's vendor network across a scale of increasing business impact based on their security rating and criticality classification (where Tier 1 represents the company's most critical vendors)
To learn more about the role of vendor risk assessment in developing a risk treatment plan for critical vendors, a process some board members will expect to be involved in, watch this video:
Step 4: Identify your evidence sources
To highlight the credibility of your reports and increase the chances of the board agreeing with any costly remediation suggestions, identify all of the data sources you referenced to build your cyber report.
Evidence sources could include:
- Security questionnaires
- Certifications
- Automate scanning results
- Compliance certifications
UpGuard's Trust Exchange is a free resource that expedites the evidence-gathering process for vendor risk assessments and cybersecurity reports. The following video offers an overview of the tool.
Sign up to Trust Exchange for free >
Best practices for cybersecurity reporting in 2024
When building your cybersecurity report, keep the following best practices in mind:
Be clear and precise
Producing a clear and concise report will ensure your intended audience—executives, board members, or security teams—can quickly understand your security suggestions without wasting time on clarification requests.
This will require the inclusion of high-level summaries and short explanations that get straight to the point. When technical stakeholders are reading your cyber reports, more detailed cyber risk explanations should supplement high-level summaries in a separate section of the report.
Above all, try to avoid using cybersecurity jargon. When it's essential, include concise explanations of all the technical terms you’ve used.
Back up your claims with evidence-based reporting
For stakeholders to take your cybersecurity reports and recommended mitigations seriously, they must be grounded on verifiable evidence. Include a list of data sources that were referenced to build your report, and be ready to provide a copy of each source if requested.
Evidence-based reporting will give your cybersecurity report the credibility to be taken seriously by the board.
Offer actionable recommendations
A cybersecurity report is useless to senior management if it lists identified cyber and compliance risks. Each listed risk should be supported with concrete responses that will directly impact the organization's security posture. To ensure you communicate remediation suggestions with the greatest impact, utilize a tool like UpGuard to project how security postures will be affected by selected remediation tasks.
