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

The Flaw of Averages in Cyber Security

Sam Savage, PhD, is the founder of ProbabilityManagement.org, author of The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty, and consulting professor at Stanford. © Copyright 2015, Sam L. Savage.

The Flaw of Averages is a set of systematic errors that occur when uncertain assumptions are replaced with single “average” numbers. The most serious of these, known as Jensen’s Inequality by mathematicians, states roughly that “plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average.” The essence of cybersecurity is the effective mitigation of uncertain adverse outcomes. I will describe two variants of the Flaw of Averages in dealing with the uncertainties of a hypothetical botnet threat. I will also show how the emerging discipline of probability management can unambiguously communicate and calculate these uncertainties.