Which cybersecurity terms your management might be misinterpreting
To implement effective cybersecurity programs and keep the security team deeply integrated into all business processes, the CISO needs to regularly demonstrate the value of this work to senior management. This requires speaking the language of business, but a dangerous trap awaits those who try. Security professionals and executives often use the same words, but for entirely different things. Sometimes, a number of similar terms are used interchangeably. As a result, top management may not understand which threats the security team is trying to mitigate, what the company’s actual level of cyber-resilience is, or where budget and resources are being allocated. Therefore, before presenting sleek dashboards or calculating the ROI of security programs, it’s worth subtly clarifying these important terminological nuances.
By clarifying these terms and building a shared vocabulary, the CISO and the Board can significantly improve communication and, ultimately, strengthen the organization’s overall security posture.
Why cybersecurity vocabulary matters for management
Varying interpretations of terms are more than just an inconvenience; the consequences can be quite substantial. A lack of clarity regarding details can lead to:
- Misallocated investments. Management might approve the purchase of a zero trust solution without realizing it’s only one piece of a long-term, comprehensive program with a significantly larger budget. The money is spent, yet the results management expected are never achieved. Similarly, with regard to cloud migration, management may assume that moving to the cloud automatically transfers all security responsibility to the provider, and subsequently reject the cloud security budget.
- Blind acceptance of risk. Business unit leaders may accept cybersecurity risks without having a full understanding of the potential impact.
- Lack of governance. Without understanding the terminology, management can’t ask the right — tough — questions, or assign areas of responsibility effectively. When an incident occurs, it often turns out that business owners believed security was entirely within the CISO’s domain, while the CISO lacked the authority to influence business processes.
Cyber-risk vs. IT risk
Many executives believe that cybersecurity is a purely technical issue they can hand off to IT. Even though the importance of cybersecurity to business is indisputable, and cyber-incidents have long ranked as a top business risk, surveys show that many organizations still fail to engage non-technical leaders in cybersecurity discussions.
Information security risks are often lumped in with IT concerns like uptime and service availability. In reality, cyberrisk is a strategic business risk linked to business continuity, financial loss, and reputational damage.
IT risks are generally operational in nature, affecting efficiency, reliability, and cost management. Responding to IT incidents is often handled entirely by IT staff. Major cybersecurity incidents, however, have a much broader scope; they require the engagement of nearly every department, and have a long-term impact on the organization in many ways — including as regards reputation, regulatory compliance, customer relationships, and overall financial health.
Compliance vs. security
Cybersecurity is integrated into regulatory requirements at every level — from international directives like NIS2 and GDPR, to cross-border industry guidelines like PCI DSS, plus specific departmental mandates. As a result, company management often views cybersecurity measures as compliance checkboxes, believing that once regulatory requirements are met, cybersecurity issues can be considered resolved. This mindset can stem from a conscious effort to minimize security spending (“we’re not doing more than what we’re required to”) or from a sincere misunderstanding (“we’ve passed an ISO 27001 audit, so we’re unhackable”).
In reality, compliance is meeting the minimum requirements of auditors and government regulators at a specific point in time. Unfortunately, the history of large-scale cyberattacks on major organizations proves that “minimum” requirements have that name for a reason. For real protection against modern cyberthreats, companies must continuously improve their security strategies and measures according to the specific needs of the given industry.
Threat, vulnerability, and risk
These three terms are often used synonymously, which leads to erroneous conclusions made by management: “There’s a critical vulnerability on our server? That means we have a critical risk!” To avoid panic or, conversely, inaction, it’s vital to use these terms precisely and understand how they relate to one another.
A vulnerability is a weakness — an “open door”. This could be a flaw in software code, a misconfigured server, an unlocked server room, or an employee who opens every email attachment.
A threat is a potential cause of an incident. This could be a malicious actor, malware, or even a natural disaster. A threat is what might “walk through that open door”.
Risk is the potential loss. It’s the cumulative assessment of the likelihood of a successful attack, and what the organization stands to lose as a result (the impact).
The connections among these elements are best explained with a simple formula:
Risk = (Threat × Vulnerability) × Impact
This can be illustrated as follows. Imagine a critical vulnerability with a maximum severity rating is discovered in an outdated system. However, this system is disconnected from all networks, sits in an isolated room, and is handled by only three vetted employees. The probability of an attacker reaching it is near zero. Meanwhile, the lack of two-factor authentication in the accounting systems creates a real, high risk, resulting from both a high probability of attack and significant potential damage.
Incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity
Management’s perception of security crises is often oversimplified: “If we get hit by ransomware, we’ll just activate the IT Disaster Recovery plan and restore from backups”. However, conflating these concepts — and processes — is extremely dangerous.
Incident Response (IR) is the responsibility of the security team or specialist contractors. Their job is to localize the threat, kick the attacker out of the network, and stop the attack from spreading.
Disaster Recovery (DR) is an IT engineering task. It’s the process of restoring servers and data from backups after the incident response has been completed.
Business Continuity (BC) is a strategic task for top management. It’s the plan for how the company continues to serve customers, ship goods, pay compensation, and talk to the press while its primary systems are still offline.
If management focuses solely on recovery, the company will lack an action plan for the most critical period of downtime.
Security awareness vs. security culture
Leaders at all levels sometimes assume that simply conducting security training guarantees results: “The employees have passed their annual test, so now they won’t click on a phishing link”. Unfortunately, relying solely on training organized by HR and IT won’t cut it. Effectiveness requires changing the team’s behavior, which is impossible without the engagement of business management.
Awareness is knowledge. An employee knows what phishing is and understands the importance of complex passwords.
Security culture refers to behavioral patterns. It’s what an employee does in a stressful situation or when no one’s watching. Culture isn’t shaped by tests, but by an environment where it’s safe to report mistakes and where it’s customary to identify and prevent potentially dangerous situations. If an employee fears punishment, they’ll hide an incident. In a healthy culture, they’ll report a suspicious email to the SOC, or nudge a colleague who forgets to lock their computer, thereby becoming an active link in the defense chain.
Detection vs. prevention
Business leaders often think in outdated “fortress wall” categories: “We bought expensive protection systems, so there should be no way to hack us. If an incident occurs, it means the CISO failed”. In practice, preventing 100% of attacks is technically impossible and economically prohibitive. Modern strategy is built on a balance between cybersecurity and business effectiveness. In a balanced system, components focused on threat detection and prevention work in tandem.
Prevention deflects automated, mass attacks.
Detection and Response help identify and neutralize more professional, targeted attacks that manage to bypass prevention tools or exploit vulnerabilities.
The key objective of the cybersecurity team today isn’t to guarantee total invulnerability, but to detect an attack at an early stage and minimize the impact on the business. To measure success here, the industry typically uses metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).
Zero-trust philosophy vs. zero-trust products
The zero trust concept — which implies “never trust, always verify” for all components of IT infrastructure — has long been recognized as relevant and effective in corporate security. It requires constant verification of identity (user accounts, devices, and services) and context for every access request based on the assumption that the network has already been compromised.
However, the presence of “zero trust” in the name of a security solution doesn’t mean an organization can adopt this approach overnight simply by purchasing the product.
Zero trust isn’t a product you can “turn on”; it’s an architectural strategy and a long-term transformation journey. Implementing zero trust requires restructuring access processes and refining IT systems to ensure continuous verification of identity and devices. Buying software without changing processes won’t have a significant effect.
Security of the cloud vs. security in the cloud
When migrating IT services to cloud infrastructure like AWS or Azure, there’s often an illusion of a total risk transfer: “We pay the provider, so security is now their headache”. This is a dangerous misconception, and a misinterpretation of what is known as the Shared Responsibility Model.
Security of the cloud is the provider’s responsibility. It protects the data centers, the physical servers, and the cabling.
Security in the cloud is the client’s responsibility.
Discussions regarding budgets for cloud projects and their security aspects should be accompanied by real life examples. The provider protects the database from unauthorized access according to the settings configured by the client’s employees. If employees leave a database open or use weak passwords, and if two-factor authentication isn’t enabled for the administrator panel, the provider can’t prevent unauthorized individuals from downloading the information — an all-too-common news story. Therefore, the budget for these projects must account for cloud security tools and configuration management on the company side.
Vulnerability scanning vs. penetration testing
Leaders often confuse automated checks, which fall under cyber-hygiene, with assessing IT assets for resilience against sophisticated attacks: “Why pay hackers for a pentest when we run the scanner every week?”
Vulnerability scanning checks a specific list of IT assets for known vulnerabilities. To put it simply, it’s like a security guard doing the rounds to check that the office windows and doors are locked.
Penetration testing (pentesting) is a manual assessment to evaluate the possibility of a real-world breach by exploiting vulnerabilities. To continue the analogy, it’s like hiring an expert burglar to actually try and break into the office.
One doesn’t replace the other; to understand its true security posture, a business needs both tools.
Managed assets vs. attack surface
A common and dangerous misconception concerns the scope of protection and the overall visibility held by IT and Security. A common refrain at meetings is, “We have an accurate inventory list of our hardware. We’re protecting everything we own”.
Managed IT assets are things the IT department has purchased, configured, and can see in their reports.
An attack surface is anything accessible to attackers: any potential entry point into the company. This includes Shadow IT (cloud services, personal messaging apps, test servers…), which is basically anything employees launch themselves in circumvention of official protocols to speed up or simplify their work. Often, it’s these “invisible” assets that become the entry point for an attack, as the security team can’t protect what it doesn’t know exists.
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