Cybersecurity Board Reporting

Board members rely on specific reports to understand the cybersecurity landscape and make informed decisions regarding their organization’s future. With two primary types of reports—incident reports and annual reviews—understanding these reports can guide a board’s strategy and enhance organizational resilience against attacks.

Cybersecurity Board Reporting: An Overview

What is a CISO Board Report?

A CISO board report communicates cybersecurity risk to the board of directors, giving a detailed overview of potential threats and the current security measures in place. The report’s primary goal is highlighting why the business should invest in cybersecurity. The board needs to prove that it effectively oversees the cybersecurity program to prove governance and meet compliance requirements. 

A CISO board report typically includes the following:

• Key Findings: A summary of major cybersecurity risks and incidents.
• Cyber Risk Management: Current strategies and controls in place to manage these risks.
• Financial Impact: Potential business and financial consequences of a cyber incident.
• Business Impact: How cybersecurity issues could affect operations and strategic goals.
• Incident Response Plans: Preparedness and plans to handle a cyber attack.
• Risk Posture: A snapshot of the company’s current risk level against acceptable levels.

What are the two types of cybersecurity reports for boards of directors?

Cybersecurity reports for the board of directors typically fall into two categories:

• Incident reports: highlighting a security incident’s business and reputation impact so that the board can make informed risk management decisions and prove oversight
• Annual reports: providing an overview of the organization’s cybersecurity risk so it can make improvements to the cybersecurity program

Why are cybersecurity reports to the board important?

Cybersecurity board reports convey risk so that directors understand the need to invest in preventive steps. These reports align cybersecurity risks with business goals to show how the program enables business outcomes. By translating these traditionally technical insights into business language, board reports enable the directors to:

• Provide for recurring training: Metrics can track training’s effectiveness to promote employee awareness of risks, like phishing attacks that can lead to credential theft.
• Approve the information security program: The reports detail current risk and security program effectiveness to ensure that the board appropriately oversees and approves the program. 
• Oversee operational management: Oversight and governance requires the board to review the incident response plan, audit reports, current risk profile, and the evolving legal and threat landscapes. 

Why Is Cybersecurity Board Reporting Critical in Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape?

What are the elements of an effective cybersecurity report for the Board of Directors?

Board reports on cybersecurity should connect technical risks to business impacts. To do this effectively, the cybersecurity board reports should include:

• Risk perspective: how current cybersecurity threats impact the organization’s risk, including qualitative insights, quantitative data, and risk implications across operational resilience, customer trust, and growth
• Strategy perspective: how the organization’s cybersecurity strategy adapts to new risks, including ways to update defense strategies and align cybersecurity actions with business and financial priorities
• Operations perspective: how well current systems and controls manage risks, typically by providing key performance indicators (KPIs) to show trends over time

Why do CISOs struggle to provide effective Board of Directors cybersecurity reports?

CISOs face two primary challenges when providing cybersecurity reports to their boards:

• Translating technical information to business risk: focusing on cybersecurity risks that have a financial impact and business risks, rather than purely technical details, to contribute to informed decision-making and aligning cybersecurity activities with organizational performance
• Stakeholder alignment: tailoring communications to stakeholders’ perspectives, like translating risk into financial metrics to make cybersecurity more relatable for stakeholders focused on profitability 

How can threat intelligence reports improve cybersecurity board reporting?

Threat intelligence improves cybersecurity board reporting by:

• Aligning with business objectives: Tailor reports to align cyber risk management with the organization’s key priorities like operational resilience and strategic growth.
• Clearly communicating risk: Translate technical metrics into clear, concise insights that board members can understand.
• Improving compliance outcomes: Use threat intelligence to meet growing regulatory pressures, ensuring the board is aware of potential risks and can make informed decisions.
• Highlighting the program’s value: Show the tangible value of security investments by illustrating the prevention of potential threats, which aids in gaining board trust and buy-in.
• Enhancing risk assessment: Use threat intelligence to provide timely assessments of the organization’s risk posture, including the business and financial impact.
• Enabling strategic decisions: Highlight key findings to guide strategic decisions and enhance acceptable levels of risk while maintaining customer trust.

How Flare Improves Cybersecurity Board Reporting

How does Flare answer cybersecurity board reporting needs?

Flare improves cybersecurity reports presented to the board of directors by providing insight into risks outside the organization’s perimeter. The threat landscape evolves rapidly with cybercriminals changing their attack methods regularly. The board of directors needs to know about the external risks the organization faces, like leaked credentials, to understand their complete risk profile. 

How can CISOs use Flare to improve their reports to the board of directors?

CISOs can use Flare’s threat intelligence reports that provide context into threats so that the board can make data-driven decisions about future cybersecurity investments. Flare’s platform enables CISOs to incorporate threat intelligence into their board reports using business-language so directors better understand risk in the way that makes sense for them. 

What are the key benefits of using Flare for cybersecurity board reporting?

Flare’s platform enables cybersecurity board reporting by:

• Interpreting threat intelligence findings for business-oriented stakeholders so they have all the information necessary to make data driven decisions. 
• Offering public reports about security trends and threats for more context into the current threat landscape
• Providing continuous automated monitoring for all assets to mitigate risk as soon as information appears somewhere unexpected or unintended
• Monitoring deep and dark web threat actor communities to find leaks before attacks happen

Cybersecurity Board Reporting and Flare

The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Flare’s platform translates technical threat intelligence data into business language so that CISOs can provide meaningful information about cyber risk to help directors make data-driven decisions about their cybersecurity investments. 

Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. Learn more by signing up for our free trial.