Risk & Cybersecurity

Crucial Questions from CIOs and CTOs

In the last post I covered the crucial questions from Boards and executives. Here I will cover the questions I’m asked by CIOs, CTOs and...

Crucial Questions from CEOs and Boards

Over the past few years I have done a lot of speaking at conferences, events and small group settings for Board directors and corporate...

3 Year Review

I’ve been doing this blog for around 3 years, largely succeeding in posting every 2 weeks. I have learnt a lot in this process and I...

The Reporting Line of Security Teams / CISOs - Updated

This can be an emotive topic for many people. It is one, I’ve found, colored more by dogma than nuance (as it seems with many things...

Are Security Analogies Counterproductive?

Do analogies actually help us or do they set back our ability to drive change? On the face of it they are a useful explanatory tool, as...

Career Advice and Professional Development

I often get asked for advice about careers and professional development. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do this in person, except...

Defense in Depth

Defense in depth is a well accepted security principle. Intuitively, it stipulates there should be multiple lines of controls so as to...

Regulatory Relationships

For some reason there have been a few people already in or moving into highly regulated industries, like finance or healthcare, that have...

The Stress and Joy of Security Jobs - Updated

There’s a lot going on in the world from conflict, crime, economic and many other pressures. Many of these matters have security...

10 Fundamental (but really hard) Security Metrics

As an industry we have been trying to deal with the issue of security metrics for a long time. I’ve written about this here, and in the...

Resilience is about Capabilities not Plans - Updated

Over the past 2 years, since I wrote the first version of this post, we’ve had a lot of opportunity to test our collective resilience....

Human Error

Human error is not an explanation, rather it is something to be explained. In analyzing and learning from incidents, not just security...