The Risk Doctor

Speaking at the Cyber Future Dialogue in Davos during the World Economic Forum (WEF)

I’m very excited to announce that I will be speaking at the Cyber Future Dialogue in two weeks in Davos, Switzerland during the World Economic Forum. This is going to be an amazing opportunity to converse with distinguished leadership from around the world on the necessity of and practical means to operationalize cyber risk quantification and the FAIR risk methodology.

Welcome to 2020! Cyber Risk Prospectuses and a “Manifesto”

Welcome to 2020!

I kept busy last month, even with the holidays. Here are some updates:

I wrote a piece for ISACA about how much spending is being done in aggregate for cyber security and how we need to rationalize the controls we are spending on.

The FAIR Institute called this my manifesto here :-)

I’m also really excited that my article on Cyber Risk Prospectuses was published over in ThreatPost. I’ve been talking about this topic for about a year now. I’m not a fan of us pretending that we work for companies that won’t get hacked. It’s not if its when and being clear about how long before we expect that loss is important. The FAIR Institute summarized my point succinctly: “Admit you will probably get breached.”

RSA 2020, NIST CSF, and Dark Reading

First off, I’m very pleased to announce that I will be presenting again next year at the RSA Conference. My session is called “Maturing Cyber-Risk Management Practices: Framework and Next Steps” (EZCL-R01). This will be done as a Collaborative Learning Session (a new RSAC format). I’ll lead a discussion then turn it over to the room to begin analyzing their risk management program and assessing its maturity.

Also:

I did a short podcast on the NIST CSF FAIR integration
Here’s another short podcast I did on risk associated with AI
I was pleased to see that the book I coauthored on FAIR was listed here in the Resources for Measuring Cybersecurity (#2!!)
I wrote this piece for Dark Reading about the unreasonableness of control frameworks
RiskLens wrote about my DarkReading piece here
Lastly, here is video from the panel discussion I led at FAIRcon19 this year covering integrating FAIR with HITRUST and NIST CSF

NIST CSF, Vendor Risk, and Threat Intel

ICYMI for September!

A large whitepaper I wrote for ISACA on vendor risk was published here
- A piece I wrote for ISACA about this is posted here
- The FAIR Institute blogged about it here
I wrote an article for the ISSA Journal about integrating threat intelligence and risk intelligence (pay-walled, but available here)
- The FAIR Institute blogged about this article here
My column for the @ISACA newsletter came out and I really liked this one as it spoke about how many organiations manage risk by storytelling. You can read it here
- FAIR Institute post on this here
I’m really proud of this one! I’ve been working with NIST to formally map FAIR to the NIST CSF standard. That was recently published. More on this here
I wrote an article on credit ratings and cyber risk here
I wrote a piece for ThreatPost about justify investments in TIG technology
Lastly, I was quoted in HealthITSecurity in an article about FAIRCon ’19

Risk Frameworks, Equifax, and Public Sector Risk

Time for another cyber risk roundup!

I was interviewed for an article on Health Security and Risk Frameworks:
- Providers Must Go Beyond Frameworks for Strong Risk Management
- 800,000 Systems Still At Risk to BlueKeep RDP Vulnerability
My hot take on the Equifax settlement
For ISACA, I took aim here discussing the ways in which public sector cyber risk assessments can account for economic impact. RiskLens blogged about my article here.
Here are some of my thoughts on the DOE move to CRQ and RiskLens post about my article.
Lastly, another I did another hot take on the US Army’s RFP for cyber security.

Apex Threat Agents, More HITRUST, Quant/Qual Showdown, and Iran

Time for another roundup! Below are some works I’ve recently done on Apex Threat Agents, HITRUST, my time at the Gartner Summit, and some thoughts on Iranian attacks.

How to Model Risk in an Apex Predator Cyber-World

Enhancing HITRUST Risk Assessments with Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ)

Gartner 2019 Debate: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Cyber Risk Analysis

Podcast: Jack Freund on How to Prepare for an Iranian Cybersecurity Threat

ZombieLoad, Business Acumen, HITRUST, and DHS Directive

As a part of my new role with RiskLens, I’ve been publishing several articles. Included here is a recap of my work over the past month:

The ZombieLoad speculative execution bug raised the specter of a possible 40% hit in performance. I gave a plan to evaluate this new bug in the context of risk trade-offs here and here.
For the @ISACA newsletter, I wrote about the importance of understanding business processes when conducting risk analyses. The specific list of business concepts I thought were important are included in the article here and RiskLens promoted it here (where they called me a security nerd LOL).
I presented on integrating FAIR into the HITRUST CSF model along with Jason Martin from Highmark Health. The slides from this presentation are here.
The new DHS Binding Operational Directive requires accelerated patching for critical and high security vulnerabilities. My thoughts on this are here for Homeland Security Today.