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

Skyrocketing Breaches?

One often hears that the rate of breaches in the healthcare industry is skyrocketing. Indeed, well over 30 million patient records have been breached in the United States alone since mandatory reporting was instituted in 2009. But the wild-eyed claims of soaring breach rates are not borne out by the data. Breach occurrence has been quite stable over the past five years, when measured in an actuarial context, and can be reasonably projected for future years.

Our research shows a strong correlation between breach rate and number of employees working in an organization such as a healthcare provider. (This is true in other industries as well.) We used the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services database of PHI breaches reported under the 2009 HITECH Act,5 and broke down the breach occurrence rate for each year by state. Plotting against the healthcare employment data by state in Figure B.2 shows a linear relationship.

Graph: incidents 0-25 versus employment 0-2000 has ascending, inclined line originating at 0 with points PR, KY, IN et cetera plotted on it. Slope y equals to 1.236E-05x.

Figure B.2 Average Data Breaches per Year...