Securing the Digital Frontier by Integrating Cybersecurity into Internal Audit Practices: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

HRMARS - In today’s the increasing use of digital technologies among companies has emphasized the importance and role of cybersecurity as a new risk management dimension. Internal audit function as third line defence in preventing cyber-attack become important role to provide assurance to the organization’s cybersecurity. The aim of this systematic literature review (SRL) is to identify the relationship between internal audit and cyber security and develop cybersecurity framework to ensure cyber security risk assessment performed well by internal audit. The systematic literature review utilized the ROSES (RepOrting Standards for Systematics Evidence Syntheses) publication standard and encompassed several research methodologies. Scopus, a highly significant scientific database, was utilized for the article selection in this study. The review only considered articles that were published from 2010 to 2024. The focus of the article primarily was on internal audit and cyber security. This review identified four main themes: internal audit characteristics, internal audit role, information technology and management action. An additional twelve sub-themes were derived from the four main themes. This paper systematically reviewed literature related to the internal audit and cyber security. The findings allow the companies to better understand the importance of cyber security that requires the need for internal audit function to assist the organisations in evaluating the effectiveness and adequacy of controls to mitigate the impact of cyber security risks.