Cybersecurity Starts with Awareness, Not Technology

For many distributors, cybersecurity still feels abstract. It shows up in headlines, vendor conversations, and insurance questionnaires, but rarely in a way that leadership teams feel equipped to evaluate directly. When it’s unclear where to start, progress often stalls.

To help close that gap, the ASA Cybersecurity Task Group has released two new resources designed to be used together: the ASA Cybersecurity Checklist and Common Cyber Attacks Facing Distributors. Taken as a pair, they offer a practical way for distributors to assess their cybersecurity exposure and understand the real-world risks those gaps can create.

The checklist keeps the focus on one simple question: Where are we today? The cyber attacks guide addresses the natural follow-up: What could happen if we’re not prepared?
Used together, they move cybersecurity out of theory and into something leadership teams can engage with.

A Practical Starting Point

The ASA Cybersecurity Checklist is intentionally framed as a self-assessment tool, not an audit, certification, or compliance requirement. Its purpose is to help organizations understand their current cybersecurity maturity and identify realistic areas for improvement over time. Cybersecurity is progressive by nature, and the checklist reflects that reality.

The checklist is organized into three maturity levels: minimal, average, and advanced. At the minimal level, the focus is on essential controls that reduce common, preventable risks. These include multi-factor authentication, basic phishing awareness training, endpoint protection, reliable backups, documented incident response planning, and data loss prevention.

As organizations mature, the checklist introduces more structured practices such as centralized logging, vendor risk assessment, network segmentation, and privileged access management. Advanced maturity reflects a higher level of resilience, including managed detection and response, immutable backups, and regular third-party testing.

Just as important as what’s included is what the checklist does not try to be. It does not prescribe specific tools. It does not expect perfection. And it explicitly encourages organizations to mark only the controls that are meaningfully in place today, not aspirational goals.

That design choice matters. The checklist is written so executive teams can use it as a starting point for informed conversations with internal IT staff, managed service providers, or trusted partners without needing to be cybersecurity experts themselves.

Making Risk Tangible

Still, a checklist alone can feel academic. Checking a box doesn’t always make the risk feel real.

That’s where Common Cyber Attacks Facing Distributors comes in.

This companion resource walks through the most common cyber attacks distributors face using plain language and familiar business scenarios. It covers threats such as phishing and credential theft, business email compromise, ransomware, malware delivered through attachments or downloads, data leakage through cloud and file-sharing tools, and risks introduced through compromised vendors or third parties.

Each scenario explains what the attack is, how it typically shows up in day-to-day operations, why distributors are targeted, and what’s at stake if the attack succeeds. The tone is intentional. The goal is to build awareness without fear, blame, or unnecessary technical detail.

What makes this resource especially effective is that each attack scenario is explicitly tied back to related controls in the Cybersecurity Checklist. The attacks describe what can happen. The checklist outlines the practices organizations use to reduce exposure across increasing maturity levels.

Designed to Work Together

This pairing is intentional. Together, the two resources create a simple, practical workflow:

Start with the checklist to identify which controls are meaningfully in place today.

Then use the cyber attacks guide to understand how gaps in those controls could be exploited in the real world.

That connection helps translate cybersecurity from a technical concern into a business risk discussion. It reframes controls as safeguards against operational disruption, financial loss, and erosion of customer trust, not just IT requirements.

Another important aspect of both documents is restraint. They are not meant to replace formal cybersecurity frameworks, audits, or professional services. Instead, they focus on the most common risks distributors face today and present them in a way that encourages informed action rather than overwhelm.
`
For many organizations, the greatest cybersecurity risk isn’t lack of sophistication. It’s inaction driven by uncertainty. When leaders don’t know where to begin, nothing moves forward. These resources are designed to lower that barrier.

Over time, distributors can revisit the checklist to track progress, use the cyber attacks guide to educate leadership teams, and ground conversations with vendors, insurers, and service providers in shared terminology and expectations. Together, they provide a practical baseline that organizations can build on as their needs evolve.

Cybersecurity is increasingly a foundational capability. It underpins digital transformation, data sharing, AI adoption, and operational resilience. Without it, innovation becomes fragile.
The ASA Cybersecurity Checklist and Common Cyber Attacks Facing Distributors are available now in the ASA resource library. They are designed to be used together, revisited over time, and adapted to fit the realities of each organization.

If cybersecurity has felt like something happening to your business rather than something you can actively manage, this is a practical place to begin.
 

CYBERSECURITY WEBPAGE