theinnerauditor

We received an e-mail inquiry from a follower of our Chapter’s LinkedIn page last week asking specifically about recovery following a cyberfraud penetration and, in general, about disaster planning for smaller financial institutions. It’s a truism that with virtually every type of business process and customer moving away from brick-and-mortar places of business to cloud supported business transactions and communication, every such organization faces an exponential increase in the threat of viruses, bots, phishing attacks, identity theft, and a whole host of other cyberfraud intrusion risks.  All these threats illustrate why a post-intrusion continuity plan should be at or near the top of any organization’s risk assessment, yet many of our smaller clients especially remain stymied by what they feel are the costs and implementational complexity of developing such a plan. Although management understands that it should have a plan, many say, “we’ll have to get to that next year”, yet it never seems to happen.

Downtime due to unexpected penetrations, breeches and disasters of all kinds not only affect our client businesses individually, but can also affect the local, regional, or worldwide economy if the business is sufficiently large or critical. Organizations like Equifax do not operate in a vacuum; they are held accountable by customers, vendors, and owners to operate as expected. Moreover, the extent of the impact on a business depends on the products or services it offers. Having an updated, comprehensive, and tested general continuity plan can help organizations mitigate operational losses in the event of any disaster or major disruption. Whether it’s advising the organization about cyberfraud in general or reviewing the different elements of a continuity plan for fraud impact, the CFE can proactively assist the client organization on the front end in getting a cyberfraud-recovery continuity plan in place and then in ensuring its efficient operation on the back end.

Specifically, regarding the impact of cyberfraud, the ACFE tells us that, until relatively recently, many organizations reported not having directly addressed it in their formal business continuity plans. Some may have had limited plans that addressed only a few financial fraud-related scenarios, such as employee embezzlement or supplier billing fraud, but hadn’t equipped general employees to deal with even the most elemental impacts of cyberfraud.   However, as these threats increasingly loomed, and as their on-line business expanded, more organizations have committed themselves to the process of formally addressing them.

An overall business continuity plan, including targeted elements to address cyberfraud, isn’t a short-term project, but rather an ongoing set of procedures and control definitions that must evolve along with the organization and its environment. It’s an action plan, complete with the tools and resources needed to continue those critical business processes necessary to keep the entity operating after a cyber disruption. Before advising our clients to embark on such a business continuity plan project, we need to make them aware that there is a wealth of documentation available that they can review to help in their planning and execution effort. An example of such documentation is one written for the industry of our Chapter’s inquirer, banking; the U.S. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council’s (FFIEC’s) Business Continuity Planning Handbook. And there are other such guides available on-line to orient the continuity process for entities in virtually every other major business sector.  While banks are held to a high standard of preparedness, and are subject to regular bank examination, all types of organizations can profit from use of the detailed outline the FFIEC handbook provides as input to develop their own plans. The publication encourages organizations of all sizes to adopt a process-oriented approach to continuity planning that involves business impact analysis as well as fraud risk assessment, management, and monitoring.

An effective plan begins with client commitment from the top. Senior management and the board of directors are responsible for managing and controlling risk; plan effectiveness depends on management’s willingness to commit to the process from start to finish. Working as part of the implementation team, CFEs can make sure both the audit committee and senior management understand this commitment and realize that business disruption from cyber-attack represents an elevated risk to the organization that merits senior-level attention. The goal of this analysis is to identify the impact of cyber threats and related events on all the client organizations’ business processes. Critical needs are assessed for all functions, processes, and personnel, including specialized equipment requirements, outsourced relationships and dependencies, alternate site needs, staff cross-training, and staff support such as specialized training and guidance from human resources regarding related personnel issues. As participants in this process, CFEs acting proactively are uniquely qualified to assist management in the identification of different cyberfraud threats and their potential impacts on the organization.

Risk assessment helps gauge whether planned cyberfraud-related continuity efforts will be successful. Business processes and impact assumptions should be stress tested during this phase. Risks related to protecting customer and financial information, complying with regulatory guidelines, selecting new systems to support the business, managing vendors, and maintaining secure IT should all be considered. By focusing on a single type of potential cyber threat’s impact on the business, our client organizations can develop realistic scenarios of related threats that may disrupt the cyber-targeted processes.  At the risk assessment stage, organization should perform a gap analysis to compare what actions are needed to recover normal operations versus those required for a major business interruption. This analysis highlights cyber exposures that the organization will need to address in developing its recovery plan. Clients should also consider conducting another gap analysis to compare what is present in their proposed or existing continuity plan with what is outlined (in the case of a bank) in the recommendations presented in the FFIEC handbook. This is an excellent way to assess needs and compliance with these and/or the guidelines available for other industries. Here too, CFEs can provide value by employing their skills in fraud risk assessment to assist the organization in its identification of the most relevant cyber risks.

After analyzing the business impact analysis and risk assessment, the organization should devise a strategy to mitigate the risks of business interruption from cyberfraud. This becomes the plan itself, a catalog of steps and checklists, which includes team members and their roles for recovery, to initiate action following a cyber penetration event. The plan should go beyond technical issues to also include processes such as identifying a lead team, creating lists of emergency contacts, developing calling trees, listing manual procedures, considering alternate locations, and outlining procedures for dealing with public relations.  As members of the team CFEs, can work with management throughout response plan creation and installation, consulting on plan creation, while advising management on areas to consider and ensuring that fraud related risks are transparently defined and addressed.

Testing is critical to confirm cyber fraud contingency plans. Testing objectives should start small, with methods such as walkthroughs, and increase to eventually encompass tabletop exercises and full enterprise wide testing. The plan should be reviewed and updated for any changes in personnel, policies, operations, and technology. CFEs can provide management with a fraud-aware review of the plan and how it operates, but their involvement should not replace management’s participation in testing the actual plan. If the staff who may have to execute the plan have never touched it, they are setting themselves up for failure.

Once the plan is created and tested, maintaining it becomes the most challenging activity and is vital to success in today’s ever-evolving universe of cyber threats. Therefore, concurrent updating of the plan in the face of new and emerging threats is critical.

In summary, cyberfraud-threat continuity planning is an ongoing process for all types of internet dependent organizations that must remain flexible as daily threats change and migrate. The plan is a “living” document. The IT departments of organizations are challenged with identifying and including the necessary elements unique to their processes and environment on a continuous basis. Equally important, client management must oversee update of the plan on a concurrent basis as the business grows and introduces new on-line dependent products and services. CFEs can assist by ensuring that their client organizations keep cyberfraud related continuity planning at the top of mind by conducting periodic reviews of the basic plan and by reporting on the effectiveness of its testing.