Feb Update! Davos, NIST, Cloud Smart, and Risk Mgmt Maturity

Happy February everyone!

First off, here was my recounting of my time in Davos last month. It was a good event with lots of fascinating people, each an expert in their field.

Ian Amit (CISO, Cimpress) and I held a webinar about integrating FAIR with NIST. You can access that on-demand here.

I wrote an article about application rationalization during cloud migration for Homeland Security Today. It’s focused on the Federal Cloud Smart policy, but if you look closely, you’ll see this applies to virtually every organization. The FAIR Institute wrote about this article here.

I was quoted in Risk Management, a publication of RIMS on some predictions I made (Boards are going to be pressed for more risk quantification).

Lastly, I finalized the Risk Management Maturity Report for the FAIR Institute. You can read this here.

 

 

 

 

 

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

CFD2020-SpeakerCard-CyberRisk_Panel_01

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:

 

 

 

 

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Security Leadership is Risk Leadership

When writing this blog post for ISACA it occurred to me that to be an effective cybersecurity leader requires that you understand the dynamic of risk communication and becoming comfortable with the decisions of well-informed business leaders.

You can read the article here.

RSAC 2019 Virtual Pen Testing Slides Available

With RSA completed over two weeks ago, and an ensuing sickness, I realized I haven’t posted about my presentation with Joel Amick. I thoroughly enjoying sharing this work with the RSA audience and had some great conversations afterwards. I think agent-based modeling (ABM) has some interesting use cases in cybersecurity and risk management. I think that in organizations that have data sets about their assets covering control strengths, threats, and losses, there is valid application of ABM to provide some attacker forecasting.

The presentation slides have been posted here. The slides are static and don’t show the video of the model, however the presentation was recorded and the video has been posted on RSAC onDemand for those that attended. When it’s opened to the rest of the world, I will post that.