Risk & Cybersecurity

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...

Controls - Updated

I wrote the first version of this post nearly 3 years ago. It is interesting that since then much of it remains true. Oddly, it also...

Organizational Politics

At every stage in your career and in every part of your role you are going to have to deal with organizational politics. By this, I don’t...

Secrets of Successful Security Programs - Part 2

As introduced in the last post, a successful security program is made up of two distinct elements: A series of episodic big bets that...