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 5
Risk Matrices, Lie Factors, Misconceptions, and Other Obstacles to Measuring Risk

We are ultimately trying to move cybersecurity in the direction of more quantitative risk assessment methods. The previous chapters showed that there are several methods that are both practical (the authors have used these methods in actual cybersecurity environments) and have evidence of measurably improving risk assessments. We offered an extremely simple method based on a one-for-one substitution of the components of a risk matrix. Anyone who has the technical skills to work in cybersecurity certainly has the skills to implement that solution. Once an analyst becomes familiar with the basics, he or she can build on the foundation we’ve provided with our methods in later chapters.

But regardless of the evidence shown so far, we expect to see resistance to many of the concepts shown. There will be sacred cows, red herrings, black swans, and a few other zoologically-themed metaphors related...