Cyber Risk Frameworks, MITRE ATT&CK, and Risk Communication in the ISACA Journal

Welcome to your April-May Cyber Risk Update!

  • I was asked to write a piece about how umbrella frameworks like NIST can be incomplete without detailed implementation guidance, but also how such detailed methodologies like CVSS were also lacking. The result was this piece I wrote for the FAIR Institute.
  • I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that NIST released an IR draft that referenced FAIR directly as a way to tie together cyber risk and enterprise risk. You can read my hot take on this here and read the standard here.
  • I was very honored to be able to speak at the Inaugural Volatility and Risk Institute Conference hosted by NYU Stern, where I was interview by the inestimable Phil Venables. He write his thoughts about this here and you can watch the interview here, where you can see my amazing Zoom background (h/t to Digital Blasphemy where I’ve been a lifetime member since the late 90s)
  • Here is a piece I wrote for Dark Reading where I describe how to integrate MITRE ATT&CK into your risk modeling
  • Lastly my article on Risk Communication was published in this month’s ISACA Journal, available here. It was published as a feature article in their Human Element of Risk issue.

 

 

 

85.7% COVID-19 Free March Update!

RSA Roundup

Updates on the Monday all-day FAIR session I did with Jack Jones, Chad Weinman, and Rachel Slabotsky, as well as my Thursday session on maturing your risk management practice.

I was quoted in Financial Management Magazine here as I talked about expressing cyber risk in financial terms. RiskLens wrote about this here.

My panel session at the Cyber Future Foundation in Davos was posted online, you can watch it here:

 

And lastly, everyone’s business continuity plans are being stress tested this week and I imagine that there is going to be a heightened interest in BC/DR once this is all done. I did a quick podcast interview on how to factor in the Coronavirus into your cyber risk planning.

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)

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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.