FAIR Institute Champion Award

I was humbled this week when I was awarded the FAIR Champion award from the FAIR Institute at their annual conference last week at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA.

Jack Jones has created this extraordinary thing in FAIR and it is and will continue to do nothing less than revolutionize our industry. That he decided to share even a little bit of that with me by coauthoring the FAIR book is so incredibly humbling. It’s a gift that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

That I have been good in any way in building risk programs is due entirely to his teachings and mentoring early in my life and I am so incredibly grateful.

One of the best things about the FAIR Institute is the culture of giving back and during my acceptance I offered to anyone that I’d be happy to help them through their journey to risk quantification. I’ll do that again here: if you need support, tips, or just a sympathetic ear while building your risk program, please do reach out. I’d be happy to help :-)

RSA 2018 Presentation Video

RSA posted my presentation from this year’s conference, Implementing a Quantitative Cyber-Risk Framework: A FinSrv Case Study. You can hear me explain the organizational environment and requirements and the automated risk assessment solutions I put in place to satisfy them.

The slides are still available here.

FAIR Conference ’18 Panel – Getting Buy-In for a Quantitative Risk Management Program

I’m looking forward to participating on this panel discussion at the upcoming FAIR Conference. This is a topic that really speaks to me and I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve experienced and hearing from the co-panelists about how they’ve accomplished the same.

Here’s the full agenda and if you haven’t registered yet you can do so here.

ICYMI: Risk Management and the Paradox of Common Sense

I really enjoy reading Duncan Watts work and I was blown away by how he assailed the concept of common sense that we all rely upon so readily:

What we don’t realize, however, is that common sense often works just like mythology. By providing ready explanations for whatever particular circumstances the world throws at us, common sense explanations give us the confidence to navigate from day to day and relieve us of the burden of worrying about whether what we think we know is really true, or is just something we happen to believe.

Questioning our perception of reality is pretty heavy and you can spend a lot of time working through that. But in my article I use this idea to break out of the crutch of using common sense to manage risk.

You can read the full article on the @ISACA Newsletter site here.

 

ICYMI: Organizational Signals for Changing Risk Appetite

I was inspired to write this article by a change in the speed limit that happened on a local Interstate. It was a good jumping off point to illustrate the parallels between speed limits and risk appetite and what it takes to change each.

You can read the article on the FAIR Institute website here.

ICYMI: Concept Creep: Why Cyber Risk Problems Never Get Solved

I had a great time writing this post for the FAIR Institute. I was inspired by post-doc David Levari of the Harvard Business School’s article in The Conversation called Why Your Brain Never Runs out of Problems to Find. In it he talks about how our brains have a sliding scale of what “badness” is over time and how something will always occupy the spot of “badness” even when its not that big of a deal. In my write-up, I apply that to cybersecurity and include some pointers for FAIR practitioners.

You can read my latest FAIR Institute post here.

Security Awareness and the Bystander Effect

My latest @ISACA column was posted recently. This time I tackled a hard issue in the human factors space: awareness training. Specifically, I explored the notion that having a good security team may actually impede the effectiveness of a security awareness program. I did this through the application of some concepts from the bystander effect.

You can check it out here: Security Awareness and the Bystander Effect.