Automating Information Security Risk Assessment for IT Services

Abstract

Information Security (IS) Risk Assessment is a main part of risk analysis; it helps organizations make decisions to protect their Information Technology (IT) services and underlying IT assets from potentially adverse events. How to do assessment in this context, however, is not a well defined task. Some approaches provide guidelines but leave analysts to define how to implement them, leading to different mechanisms to identify input data, different procedures to process those inputs, and different results as a consequence. To address this problem, we present a semiautomatic procedure, based on data systematically obtained from modern IT Service Management (ITSM) tools used by IT staff to handle IT services’ assets and configurations. We argue that these tools handle actual data that may be used to collect inputs for a IS risk assessment procedure, thus reducing subjective values. We evaluated the procedure in a real case study and found that our approach actually reduces variability of some results. We also identified areas that must be addressed in future work.