ISACA Global Achievement Award Winner

I’m very pleased to announce that I have been awarded an ISACA Global Achievement Award, specifically the John W. Lainhart IV Common Body of Knowledge Award. Full citation below:

ISACA John W. Lainhart IV Common Body of Knowledge Award
Scope: Recognizes an individual for major contributions to the development and enhancement of the common body of knowledge used by the ISACA community.

Jack Freund, Ph.D., CISA, CISM, CRISC
“For contributions in developing the CRISC Certification and for ensuring the integrity and quality of the CRISC Certification exam content.”

I’ll be granted this award on 28 May at the ISACA EuroCACS conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The full list of this year’s award winners is here.

I’m very proud of the time I’ve spent working on the CRISC certification (almost 8 years now) and it’s astronomical growth since its launch. I truly do believe that it is a very high quality IT risk certification that employers can rely on to ensure that their staff has core IT risk knowledge. I’m very humbled to have my small contributions acknowledged in this way.

 

Joined RiskLens as Professional Advisor

I recently accepted a position with RiskLens as a professional advisor. I’m looking forward to working with Jack Jones again as well the great team they have assembled there. My immediate project there will be advising on the product roadmap and assist them with taking their amazing quantitative risk platform to the next level.

Official announcement here.

 

Jack and Jack talk Risk Modeling at Cyber Risk NA

I had a great time this week at Risk.Net’s Cyber Risk NA conference this week. I moderated a panel on Modeling Cyber Risk with Jack Jones (EVP RiskLens), Ashish Dev (Principal Economist at the Federal Reserve), Manan Rawal (Head of US Model Risk Mgmt, HSBC USA), and Sidhartha Dash (Research Director, Chartis Research).

We only had 45 minutes and ran out of time before we could get to all the topics I had on my list, so I wanted to included some notes here of things we covered:

  • I opened with a scenario where I asked the panelists if they were presenting to the board would it be more honest to disclose the following top risks: 1) IOT, GDPR, and Spectre/Meltdown or 2) Our Top Risk is that we aren’t modeling cyber risk well enough. Most everyone chose option 2 :-)
  • We talked about whether there was a right way to model
    • Poisson, Negative Binomial, Log Normal
    • Frequentist vs Bayesian
  • Which model for scenarios makes more sense: BASEL II categories or CIA Triad?
  • Level of abstraction required for modeling
    • Event funnel: Event of interest vs incident vs loss event
    • Top Down vs. Bottoms Up
  • What are key variables necessary to model cyber risk (everyone agreed that some measure of frequency of loss and impact/magnitude are necessary)

Things we wanted to get to but ran out of time:

  • What is necessary to get modeling approved and validated by Model Risk Management
  • Should you purchase an external model or build your own?
  • Can we use our Cyber Models for stress testing/ CTE calculations?
  • Do we combine cyber scenarios with other operational risk scenarios?
  • One audience question that we ran out of time for was “How was the FAIR approach different than LDA & AMA and how does it address their weaknesses (Frequency and severity correlation)”
    • This was a good question but to be fair, FAIR wasn’t designed to be a stress testing model. However, many of the inputs used for FAIR are also used for LDA and AMA.
  • There were lots of other audience questions about the use of FAIR which is always encouraging!

Cyber Risk Cassandras

I wrote this latest bit for the @ISACA column after reading Richard Clarke’s book and trying to rationalize how it applies to cyber risk. It’s overly easy to predict failures and impending doom at a macro level, its much harder to do it at the micro level, which is infinitely more interesting and useful.

You can read more here

New Book: Fintech Growth and Deregulation

A new book I had the pleasure of editing, along with Diane Maurice and David Fairman, has been recently released. I received my copies today and I’m very happy with the results. This was an interesting project to work on and a problem space that is very modern and moving fast. I was very pleased with the authors I got to work with (Tony Martin-Vegue and Patrick McConnell). They did a great job covering their perspective of the topic (Quantification and Governance).

You can pick up a copy here.

@tdmv