National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommends that organizations perform cyber risk assessments regularly to identify security vulnerabilities and to control levels of exposure to threats. We discuss a method to customize the ranking of cyber threats based on the organization’s maturity level of implementing NIST controls and we use FAIR model’s LEF component as a measure of the severity of cyber threats. The methodology integrates NIST maturity levels to calculate the resistance strength factor and produce the LEF values for each threat. The LEF value is then used to represent the severity level of the threat to the specific organization. This hybrid risk assessment approach will help stakeholders make data-informed decisions on improving security measures and provide accurate values that represent the current security state of their organization.
As incessant cyber-attacks on organizations increase in complexity and destructiveness with the aim
to disrupt services and steal information, proactive measures are critically needed to mitigate these
attacks, cyber security risk assessment tops the list of measures. This study provides an overview of
cybersecurity risk assessment, various types of frameworks, and the difference between qualitative
and quantitative cybersecurity risk assessments. The aim of this early research is the creation of a
hybrid system which integrates an existing cybersecurity risk assessment system based on the NIST framework into the Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) model, an analytic risk assessment model that enables true quantitative measurement. In this study, we propose a hybrid-assessment tool which will be used to describe and compare the impact of using NIST driven values
as inputs for the resistance strength to determine the Loss Event Frequent (LEF) and Annual Loss
Expectancy (ALE) of a risk scenario as opposed to using experts’ opinion as user inputs for determination of the LEF and ALE values.
