Risky Business

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Risk is a topic that I like to talk about a lot, mainly because I managed to get it ‘wrong’ for a very long time, and when I finally did realise what I was missing, everything else I struggled with fell into place around it. For me, therefore, Risk is the tiny cog in the big machine that, if it is not understood, greased and maintained, will snarl up everything else.

In the early days of my career, risk was something to be avoided, whatever the cost. Or rather, it needed to be Managed, Avoided, Transferred or Accepted down to the lowest possible levels across the board. Of course, I wasn’t so naive as to think all risks could be reduced to nothing, but they had to be reduced, and “accepting” a risk was what you did once it had been reduced. Imagine my surprise that you could “accept” a risk before you had even treated it!

There are many areas of risk that everyone should know before they start their risk management programme in whatever capacity they are in, but here are my top three:

Accepting the risk

If you want to know how not to accept a risk, look no further than this short music video  (which I have no affiliation with, honestly). Just accepting something because it is easy and you get to blame your predecessor or team is no way to deal with risks. Crucially, there is no reason why high-level risks cannot be accepted, as long as whoever does it is qualified to do so, cognizant of the potential fallout, and senior enough to have the authority to do so. Certain activities and technologies are inherently high risk; think of AI, IoT or oil and politics in Russia, but that doesn’t mean you should not be doing those activities. 

A company that doesn’t take risks is a company that doesn’t grow, and security risks are not the only ones that are being managed daily by the company leadership. Financial, geographic, market, people, and legal risks are just some things that need to be reviewed.

Your role as the security risk expert in your organisation is to deliver the measurement of the risks clearly as possible. That includes ensuring everyone understands how the score is derived, the logic behind it and the implications of that score. This brings us neatly to the second “Top Tip”:

Measuring the risk

Much has been written about how risks should be measured, quantitatively or qualitatively, for instance, financially or reputationally. Should you use a red/amber/green approach to scoring it, a percentage, or figure out of five? What is the best way to present it? In Word, Powerpoint or Excel? (Other popular office software is available.)

The reality is that, surprisingly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is choosing an approach and giving it a go; see if it works for you and your organisation. If it doesn’t, then look at different ways and methods. Throughout it all, however, it is vital that everyone involved in creating, owning and using the approach knows precisely how it works, what the assumptions are, and the implications of decisions being made from the information presented.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the NASA approach to risk. Now NASA, having the tough job of putting people into space via some of the most complicated machines in the world, would have a very rigorous, detailed and even complex approach to risk; after all, people’s lives are at stake here. And yet, their risk matrix comprises a five-by-five grid with probability on one axis and consequence on the other. The grid is then scored Low-Medium or High:

Seriously. That’s it. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. However, a 30-page supporting document explains precisely how the scores are derived, how probability and consequence should be measured, how the results can be verified, and so on. The actual simple measurement is different from what is important. It is what is behind it that is.

Incidents and risk

Just because you understand risk now, you may still need to be able to predict everything that might happen to you. For example, “Black Swan” events (from Nicholas Nasim Taleb’s book of the same name) cannot be predicted until they are apparent they will happen.

By this very fact, creating a risk register to predict unpredictable, potentially catastrophic events seems pointless. However, that differs from how an excellent approach to risk works. Your register allows you to update the organisational viewpoint on risk continuously. This provides supporting evidence of your security function’s work in addressing said risks and will enable you to help define a consensual view of the business’s risk appetite.

When a Black Swan event subsequently occurs (and it will), the incident response function will step up and address it as it would any incident. Learning points and advisories would be produced as part of the documented procedures they follow (You have these, right?), including future areas to look out for. This output must be reviewed and included in the risk register as appropriate. The risk register is then reviewed annually (or more frequently as required), and controls are updated, added or removed to reflect the current risk environment and appetite. Finally, the incident response team will review the risk register, safe in the knowledge it contains fresh and relevant data, and ensure their procedures and documentation are updated to reflect the most current risk environment.

Only by having an interconnected and symbiotic relationship between the risk function and the incident response function will you benefit most from understanding and communicating risks to the business.

So there you have it, three things to remember about risk that will help you not only be more effective when dealing with the inevitable incident but also help you communicate business benefits and support the demands of any modern business.

Risk is not a dirty word.

Links to other interesting stuff (affiliate links)

Building a Modern Exposure Management Program

Access Controls that Move – The Power of Data Security Posture Management

Vulnerabilities and Insights: A Look at Cybersecurity Challenges

Agile? Or FrAgile?

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(I found this piece deep in the vaults at (TL)2 Towers, so I figured I would break my non-blogging streak.)

“Sensitive client code has been discovered on a GitHub repository, and it looks like one of our developers put it there. The client is upset, and their Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) wants to meet with you in New York to discuss what happened.”

Not the best email start to a Tuesday morning, I grant you, but I did at least have two things in my favour; six days before the meeting with the client and an excellent Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) headed up by a very talented and focussed individual based out of Miami. So I felt confident we could get to the bottom of the incident.

Fast forward to the following Monday afternoon (don’t worry, this isn’t a blog about cyber forensic investigations), and I am walking out to the cab back to the airport with a thankful, happy client and the promise of more billable work in the form of security testing.

It sounds like the beginning and end of two different stories, but this is a real example from back in 2016 during my tenure as a CISO. What initially felt like a nightmare scenario was quickly turned around, and three things became apparent very quickly:

  1. Proper incident management is crucial because it is not a case of “if we have a data breach” nowadays but “when we have a data breach”.
  2. Agile working methods are a double-edged sword; we get work done quickly and effectively, but if we are not careful, boy, can it bite us in the ass.
  3. Focusing on the client, their perceptions, need for honesty, demands, and wishes are paramount.

I want to focus on 2 and 3 from above because let’s face it, incident management is often carried out by the cool-looking security folks who swoop in when it all goes wrong.

Is it Agile or FrAgile?

Agile working methodologies are, I am told, wonderful ways to get work done quickly and effectively. Flexible working, the heavy reliance on technologies, still often in early release stages and updated daily. You can reuse and share code through various repositories, test things out with the rallying cry of “Fail fast! Fail often!”, pull out your credit card and spin up servers on the other side of the world by the time the kettle has boiled or the coffee machine dripped its last drop.

The problem with this is that if we are not careful, the environment becomes the wild west, with code flying around various platforms containing hardcoded admin credentials and schematics shared openly as you struggle to squash that last bug with the help of the internet. (I am having palpitations just thinking about it.)

Sticking code up onto GitHub doesn’t make you agile; it makes you fragile. You must prepare and plan, work as a cohesive unit with your team and have established (and secure) ways of working with these new and funky tools that are not only effective but also in the best interests of the client.

The client is King AND Queen.

I recall another incident where a client contacted us to say they had found their code and credentials on a GitHub-type site. They were (unsurprisingly) very upset and demanded our response. Upon investigation, it turned out the data in question was uploaded there some two years earlier, was out of date, and the credentials were changed long ago anyway. It was severe, but we were off the hook with confirmation that third parties downloaded none of the data!

Famous last words. The client was livid.

The incident escalated to their board, and we were bought to task for the security lapse in no uncertain terms. However, we had forgotten one crucial thing in all of this; it wasn’t our data to lose in the first place. 

There is a saying in information security circles; “my risk model is not your risk model”. It means that what risks affect you are not the same as those that affect me. Precisely the mistake we made with this client. It didn’t matter that nothing had happened; it didn’t matter that the data and credentials were stale; we were sloppy and slapdash with their intellectual property. We had broken their trust.

In the middle of the high-pressure project environment, losing sight of what the client holds dear versus what you are trying to achieve in the here and now is easy.

Making the Leap

Do you need to address your agile working practises and understanding of your client’s motivations and risks? Here are two data points to consider:

  1. A constant increase in the inclusion of unlimited liability clauses in your contracts. Right or wrong, they aren’t going away, and as you access more of a client’s sensitive and confidential data to “make digital work” for them, it will continue to do so.
  2. When it happens, the cost of a data breach is increasing. According to the Ponemon Institute/IBM Security report “2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report – A comprehensive analysis of data breaches reported in 2018,” the average cost of data breaches has increased by 12%, a whopping $3.92M in the healthcare industry alone. You won’t get much change out of that for a satisfactory bonus pool.

When you leave your house in the morning, you lock your door, maybe enable an alarm system. When you leave your car, park it in a reputable garage and lock the door, immobilising the engine and setting the alarm.

Then you go to work and copy someone else’s confidential data and credentials to an open file share. Can you see the paradox?

Taking that leap in maintaining client confidence, assuring them of intelligent decision-making, agile (not fragile) working practises and mental rigour to maintaining their crown jewels is challenging. But it is essential.

Why did that first client give me more business after a breach? Demonstrating that we were in control of our processes and ensuring he and his risks were obviously the centre of our world helped: that and a high degree of transparency. But that initial breach was too high a price for extra business and a warm handshake.

Shameless Coronavirus Special Promotion – Risk Edition!

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iu-18Many, many moons ago, my good friend and learned colleague Javvad Malik and I came up with a way to explain how a risk model works by using an analogy to a pub fight. I have used it in a presentation that has been given several times, and the analogy has really helped people understand risk, and especially risk appetite more clearly (or so they tell me). I wrote a brief overview of the presentation and the included risk model in this blog some years back.

And now the Coronavirus has hit humanity AND the information security industry. Everyone is losing their minds deciding if they should self isolate, quarantine or even just generally ignore advice from the World Health Organisation (like some governments have shown a propensity to do) and carry on as usual and listen to the Twitter experts. During a conversation of this nature, Javvad and I realised that the Langford/Malik model could be re-purposed to not only help those who struggle with risk generally (most humans) but those who really struggle to know what to do about it from our own industry (most humans, again).

Disclaimer: we adopted the ISO 27005:2018 approach to measuring risk as it is comprehensive enough to cover most scenarios, yet simple enough that even the most stubborn of Board members could understand it. If you happen to have a copy you can find it in section E.2.2, page 48, Table E.1.

Click the image to view in more detail and download.

The approach is that an arbitrary, yet predefined (and globally understood) value is given to the Likelihood of Occurrence – Threat, the Ease of Exploitation, and the Asset Value of the thing being “risk measured”. This generates a number from 0-8 going from little risk to high risk. The scores can then be banded together to define if they are High, Medium or low, and can be treated in accordance with your organisation’s risk appetite and risk assessment procedures.

In our model, all one would have to do is define the importance of their role from “Advocate” (low) to “Sysadmin” (high), personality type (how outgoing you are) and the Level of human Interaction your role is defined as requiring. Once ascertained, you can read off your score and see where you sit in the risk model.

In order to make things easier for you, dear reader, we then created predefined actions in the key below the model based upon that derived risk score, so you know exactly what to do. In these troubled times, you can now rest easy in the knowledge that not only do you understand risk more but also what to do in a pandemic more.

You’re welcome.

Note: Not actual medical advice. Do I really need to state this?

The Power of Silence

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Not so many years ago in the dim and distant past, the very first full length public talk I did was called “An Anatomy of a Risk Assessment”; it was a successful talk and one I was asked to present several times again in the following years. Below is a film of the second time I presented it, this time at BSides London:

My presentation style left a lot to be desired, and I seemed unable to stop using note cards until almost eighteen months later despite me not using them for other talks I gave! (Top speaking tip folks, never use printed notes when speaking, it conditions your mind to think it can only deliver when using them.) But that is not the focus of this message.

One of the pieces of “anatomy” that I spoke about in terms of risk assessments was the ears. The principle being that since you have two ears and one mouth, when auditing or assessing you should be listen twice as much as be speaking. This is important for two reasons, the second of which may not be as obvious as the first:

  1. If you are assessing someone or something, you should be drawing information from them. When you are speaking you are not gaining any information from them which is a wasted opportunity. As a consequence of this therefore,
  2. There will be periods of silence which you must not feel tempted to break. Just as nature fills a vacuum so a human wants to fill a silence. Silence therefore will encourage the target of the assessment to open up even more, just so as not to feel awkward!

Interestingly, after my very first presentation of this talk, a member of the audience asked me if i had ever been in the Police Force. “I haven’t” I replied.

Well, some of the techniques you just described are exactly like police interrogation techniques, especially the silence. I should know, I used them every day!

Flattered though I was, I did become a little concerned! Was i taking this risk assessment malarkey a little too seriously? Was i subjecting people to what amounted to an interrogation?

Obviously this was not the case, but it occurred to me that in the many books i have read on risk assessment and audit, never is the softer side of the process covered. We tend to focus on the technology, or the boxes that need to be ticked, when actually we can simply sit back and let others do the talking. I also employ humour very often to help people relax, and even do it when i am on the other side of the table too. It can make a gruelling and mindless activity far more engaging and allow you to connect with the person on the other side of the table more effectively.

It engenders trust.

You can apply many of the techniques described in the presentation in your daily work lives, especially when on a discovery programme or wanting to get to the bottom of an incident. In fact, I can’t think of anything easier than having a (one-sided) chat with someone and getting the assessment completed.

Or as Will Rogers, actor and vaudeville performer in the early 1900’s put it:

Never miss a good chance to shut up

On another note, look out for a new series of YouTube films coming from me in the next few weeks.

I give you, The Lost CISO

Are you the most thrilling ride at the theme park?

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emotional-rollercoaster-53445I recently spent the day in Thorpe Park (a bit like a down market DisneyLand for anyone not from the UK), and we were all looking forward to a day of roller coasters, silly ride photographs, bad overpriced food and generally some good fun. We had never been before, and my kids are now old enough to be able to go on almost all of the rides now. Much excitement was expected.

Yes, we had a good day overall, but not as good as it should have been. The first two rides we tried to get on as soon as the gates swung open were closed because of technical faults; both these rides were at opposite corners of the park, so after 30 minutes not only had we not even had one ride, we hadn’t even got in the queue for one. This somewhat set the tone for the day. At the fourth closed ride my wife gave some unfortunate teenaged park assistant an earful (he was rescued by a senior colleague). At the fifth we could only laugh and accept our fate. And so it went on; the photo booth to collect photos from one ride was closed after we had staged the perfect family shot on the ride, the hand dryers in the toilets all blew cold, cold air on a cold day, vending machines were out of order, and so on. The more we looked the more we found fault.

We still had a good day, but we won’t be going back any time soon, and conceded that in the theme park area at least, the Americans have by far the best theme parks compared to Britain.

The whole experience reminded me of some security groups I have experienced. We very often promise a world of smiling, excited faces, a world made better by our presence and an experience that will surpass your expectations. The reality is often a little more drab than that.

We often see security functions that allegedly “enable your teams to work more effectively”, or “allow you to leverage your creativity while we drive your competitiveness” and so forth. In our drive to be seen to be a benefit to the business (good), we often set ourselves up for failure as we establish these grandiose statements (bad). “Leveraging security to be a differentiator in the marketplace” is great, but only if you can deliver on it. An ISO27001 certification may help your business get more work initially, but if the basic principles of good security practice in your delivery teams is not there, that work will soon be lost. Your company workforce working securely and in harmony is the best way of supporting your business, not having a “security strategy that differentiates us to our clients”.

Let’s focus on getting the rides running properly in your security programme before marketing ourselves in a way that ultimately shows even our hand dryers don’t work.