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.

 

Presenting on Agent Based Risk Modeling at RSA Conference Next Week

RSA Conference is next week and I’m excited to share that I will be presenting on some work a a colleague and I have done on building an Agent-Based Model (ABM) using FAIR risk data.

This should be an interesting discussion, so please join me next Wednesday at 2:50PM Pacific in Moscone West 2011.

I also served on the program committee this year for the GRC track and I can report that this year’s risk and metrics presentations will be insanely good! You are all in for a treat. If you will be in SF next week for the conference, be sure and look me up.

 

Applied Risk Appetite

“There is a certain uselessness in saying an organization does not want to accept high risk.”

My latest @ISACA article was published and as I was re-reading this line it resonated with me even more. You have to have more fidelity in how you define risk appetite for it to be useful. More tips on how to do that in the full article here.