Book Image

How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk

By : Douglas W. Hubbard, Richard Seiersen
Book Image

How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk

By: Douglas W. Hubbard, Richard Seiersen

Overview of this book

How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk exposes the shortcomings of current “risk management” practices, and offers a series of improvement techniques that help you fill the holes and ramp up security. In his bestselling book How to Measure Anything, author Douglas W. Hubbard opened the business world’s eyes to the critical need for better measurement. This book expands upon that premise and draws from The Failure of Risk Management to sound the alarm in the cybersecurity realm. Some of the field’s premier risk management approaches actually create more risk than they mitigate, and questionable methods have been duplicated across industries and embedded in the products accepted as gospel. This book sheds light on these blatant risks and provides alternate techniques that can help improve your current situation. You’ll also learn which approaches are too risky to save and are actually more damaging than a total lack of any security. Dangerous risk management methods abound; there is no industry more critically in need of solutions than cybersecurity. This book provides solutions where they exist and advises when to change tracks entirely.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Foreword
2
Foreword
3
Acknowledgments
4
About the Authors
9
Index
10
EULA

Chapter 1
The One Patch Most Needed in Cybersecurity

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

—Sherlock Holmes

The Bascombe Valley Mystery1

In the days after September 11, 2001, increased security meant overhauled screening at the airport, no-fly lists, air marshals, and attacking terrorist training camps. But just 12 years later, the FBI was emphasizing the emergence of a very different concern: the “cyber-based threat.” In 2013, FBI director James B. Comey, testifying before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, stated the following:

. . .we anticipate that in the future, resources devoted to cyber-based threats will equal or even eclipse the resources devoted to non-cyber based terrorist threats.

—FBI director James B. Comey, November 14, 20132

This is a shift in priorities we cannot overstate. How many organizations in 2001, preparing for what they perceived as the key threats at the time, would...