eCrime and Information Security Congress

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IMG_0002I presented at the eCrime and Information Security Congress on Wednesday, and had a terrific time presenting on my thoughts around making risk assessments more effective for the business. It was probably the largest audience I have presented to, and the stage and AV set up was suitably impressive. I had the support of two fine upstanding members of the infosec community (as well as @j4vv4d and @sirjester…) throughout the day and was fortunate enough to get some great feedback from both the organisers (in the form of @jonhawes) and Javvad after the event.

The key points I was making were:

  1. Ensure your risk management programme is producing the quality data that subsequently becomes business information.
  2. Know how to present your information in a compelling manner to ensure your message (and business information) gets across to the right people.
  3. Understand the connection between your activities and your organisations primary purpose, whatever that may be.

The presentation ran to just under twenty minutes but unfortunately the house style appeared to be not to field questions at the end. I felt I engaged well with the audience and had some unsolicited feedback to that effect afterwards, but I would have welcomed the opportunity to chat around the ideas and cocepts I was putting forwards. If anybody who watched the presentation reads this post please don’t hesitate to ask something!

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As usual I have posted the slides below; I also intend to post a movie of the slides with a voiceover, but those of you who are still waiting for the footage from an event I did in September will know how prompt I am in creating these film. Javvad I am not!

The event itself appeared to be very well attended by both the public and sponsors, in fact a huge number of sponsors compared to even RSA Europe last year. The break out session were apparently very useful (I was unable to attend any as i arrived only for the last half of the second day, but heard good things about them), and above all the food was excellent!

Thanks to the folks at AKJ Associates for inviting me to speak, and especially to Jon Hawes. With a bit of luck I will be doing more of this in the coming months.

CIA Triangle eCrimes Congress PDF

Risks, Risks Go Away, Come Back Another Day

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rain34Risk Management can be a tricky business, and this is coming from a fairly straightforward perspective with a simple view of risk management (which means even I can understand it!). To the lay person the purpose of risk management is to find the risks and then remove the risks to the organisation, otherwise why bother?

The clue of course is in the word management. Many information security professionals already know that you can do one of four things to your risks, once identified:

  1. Mitigate (aka Manage), that is implement a control or carry out at activity that reduces the risk.
  2. Avoid, or basically just stop doing the thing that is causing the risk.
  3. Transfer, or just give the risk to someone else, like an insurer or a third party vendor.
  4. Accept, or just face facts that this risk is the price you pay for doing business in this area.

So let’s assume you have completed your risk assessment and applied at least one of these actions to each risk, does this mean you are done? Does this mean you have successfully removed all of your risks from your organisation? Unfortunately, not by a long chalk.

Risks are always going to be present in your organisation; there are the ones you know about albeit reduced, the ones you think are too small to worry about, and finally the risks you have no idea about.

With the risks you know about even though you have reduced them, even though they may have gone from scoring an 8 to a 4 (in ISO 27005 parlance) they still exist! They can still happen, and worse still, the day after you have measured it, your assumptions are technically out of date. And just to really make your day, they may have even evolved and become unrecognisable and therefore invalid in your risk register.

The smaller risks you deem to be at an acceptable level will also suffer in the same way. Again, in ISO 27005 parlance the likelihood of something happening may change dramatically, or perhaps the ease of exploitation. Even worse, the asset value that you are measuring your risks against may have changed which will have a number of far reaching impacts to your risk register. To that I mean that a project that was once of little importance to the organisation, or even a physical asset, may suddenly take on a more important role and therefore greater ‘asset’ level.  All of this is going to have an impact on your risks and how they impact  your organisation.

Finally, the risks you weren’t even aware of. To be honest, and by their very nature, there is not a lot you can do about these except consider the following advice which applies to all risks;

You should be clear on one thing, namely that risk management is not a one time activity. All of the text books and standards will say that your risk register needs to be reviewed every year or after every major change. Whilst I don’t disagree with this per se (and in fact a minimum of a yearly formal review is an absolute necessity), I think in reality this needs to be much more frequent. Really, reviewing your risks needs to be an organic part of your day to a greater or lesser degree, and dependent upon the type of environment you operate in.

This does not necessarily mean you need to pore over your risk registers every day, but rather make a concerted and formal effort to be aware of the changing ‘threat landscape’; you can do this through popular news sites (e.g. BBC, CNN etc), specialist news sites (e.g. SANS, Sophos Naked security etc), blogs of people you know and trust, and of course Twitter for instance. There are likley to be many examples, but each one of these sources is going to give you a constant stream of information that needs to be processed and reviewed in some away against your risk register. You may only make minor changes every month or so, or you may find more frequent changes dependent upon your environment, but either way you will be ensuring that the your risk environment is fresh and up to date.

Now that your risk register is up to date and managed well you can be assured that the information you have is accurate, timely and subsequently meaningful. What you do with that information however is even more important, and something that will be looked at in a later post. As always, your comments and questions are welcome.

(Artwork by Peter Spier from his book, RAIN.)