Exploits & Vulnerabilities
Three Critical Facts About Cyber Risk Management
For CISOs responsible for cyber risk management, these three insights will help build a strong and reliable foundation for your proactive security strategy.
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Cybersecurity has traditionally focused on technical and tactical concerns, patching vulnerabilities and responding to threats reactively. As breaches continue to rise and inflict more damage on organizations, that limited approach isn’t enough. CISOs are increasingly expected to take a proactive approach to cyber risk management. This blog looks at the three key ways you can do this.
Have you ever realized something and wondered how you had missed it until now? Some things only become obvious when we change the way we look at them, and cyber risk management is a prime example.
Until recently, cybersecurity was almost exclusively technical and tactical, all about patching vulnerabilities and fending off threats reactively. But with the ongoing rise in breaches—up 1,000% in the U.S. last year alone—and the increasingly harsh consequences for businesses that don’t have an optimal security strategy in place, cybersecurity has become a strategic concern.
The time has come to shift from reactivity to proactivity, enabling you to stay ahead of threat actors. This means proactively managing risk and your exposure to it. Let’s explore the three crucial ways that cyber risk management can help you do this.
Cyber risk management insight #1: You need to see your attack surface the way an attacker does
There’s been a big push in the last few years for organizations to increase their attack surface visibility, discovering assets and mapping vulnerabilities. This is essential, but there is a misconception that your attack surface is purely whatever’s in your configuration management database (CMDB) or cybersecurity platform logs. The truth is, threat actors aren’t looking at your CMDB. To them, your attack surface is wherever they can find a way in—wherever you’re exposed.
Because today’s IT and threat environments are both constantly changing, a static or periodic list of assets is only going to reveal so much. Attackers are constantly probing, pushing, and scratching away at your protection, so your exposure management approach needs to be equally proactive about monitoring for and addressing changes. A fully patched and well-managed asset isn’t going to stay that way forever without intervention.
The trick, then, is to think like an attacker and go beyond discovery to figure out what kind of risk each asset poses and update that analysis over time. After all, adversaries only need to find one weakness, one time, to inflict real damage.
Cyber risk management insight #2: You can’t fix everything
There’s an old saying that when everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority. Once you start looking at your exposures and the risks your assets pose, you’re going to find there are a lot of vulnerabilities and risks. You can’t possibly address them all, particularly if your security operations center (SOC) team is understaffed and overloaded with alerts, so you need to know which ones really matter.
There’s a pretty simple formula for working that out: Risk equals likelihood multiplied by impact. Likelihood is based on a few key factors, including whether a vulnerability is present in your environment, if it’s reachable from the outside, if it’s one that’s already being exploited in the wild, or if you have any mitigation measures in place.
Impact is about what would happen if the vulnerability was exploited. How critical is the asset involved? What data is at risk? If the asset has been disrupted, how would that affect productivity, profitability, your compliance status, and your organization’s reputation? Impact has multiple technical and business-related dimensions, and it’s important to be aware of them all.
Cyber risk management insight #3: Managing risk means getting ahead of it
To manage risk instead of simply responding to it involves the most significant shift for CISOs—that of moving away from traditionally reactive cybersecurity toward proactive and strategic cyber risk management. This means combining a risk-oriented perspective with solutions and capabilities that can radically accelerate cybersecurity activities.
Being risk-aware—and continuously updating that awareness—creates new opportunities to anticipate points of exposure and address them before they become liabilities. Since adversaries tend to move at high speed, AI-powered automation increases the odds that your SOC team will mitigate risk before harm can be done.
Analysts and others have been singing the praises of automation for years. What’s changed is the types of gains that can be made by combining automation with AI. This enables you to inject analytical intelligence and well-informed decision-making capabilities into your cybersecurity strategy, helping you prioritize and circumvent cyber risk.
Cyber risk management in the real world
Every day, more organizations are applying these insights and seeing measurable improvements in their security posture. We touched on several during our spring 2025 The Future is Proactive Security event, which can be viewed on demand for free.
In one case, a U.S. firm cut its incident response time by 63% and reduced false positives through a proactive, risk-based approach. In another, a German manufacturing company adopted proactive risk strategies and was able to accelerate response times, scale up, and establish a common way of talking about cyber risk between technical personnel and executive business leaders.
The three pillars of cyber risk management
The insights above are what we at Trend Micro consider to be the three pillars of cyber risk management: visibility, prioritization, and mitigation. Visibility is about seeing everything you need to see to have a complete picture of your cyber risk exposure. Prioritization is the ability to know which risks really matter. And mitigation is about being able to take action—to address the most urgent risks and keep your environment secure.
Next steps
For more about cyber risk management, have a look at the following resources: