The Risk Doctor

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.

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.

Emerging Risk

For this months @ISACA Tips column, I wrote about the conundrum of defining and assessing emerging risk. Its an interesting space to assess; technologies and trends so cutting edge that they sorta defy precision assessments, yet also so important as to require them.

You can check it out here.

ICYMI: Interviewed by the FAIR Institute

I was recently interviewed by the FAIR Institute as a part of their Meet a Member series. I talk a little bit about my origins measuring cyber risk using FAIR.

You can listen to the interview here.