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 8
Reducing Uncertainty with Bayesian Methods

We are now in possession of proven theorems and masses of worked-out numerical examples. As a result, the superiority of Bayesian methods is now a thoroughly demonstrated fact in a hundred different areas.

—E. T. Jaynes, Quantum Physicist and Outspoken Bayesian Proponent, in Probability Theory: The Logic of Science: Principles and Elementary Applications

The previous chapter showed how the performance of subjective probabilities are objectively measurable—and they have been measured thoroughly in published scientific literature. These subjective “prior probabilities” (“priors” for short) are the starting point of all of our analyses. This is the best way to both preserve the special knowledge and experience of the cybersecurity expert and produce results that are mathematically meaningful and useful in simulations. Stating our current uncertainty in a quantitative manner allows...