Risk & Cybersecurity

The Most Important Mental Models for CISOs - Simple Steps for Outsize Effects

There are lots of problem solving techniques across many fields. These are often represented as mental models or behavioral short-cuts....

The Rising Tide and the Case for Security Optimism

Continuing with the theme of raising the baseline by reducing the cost of control we can see the next logical progression is that the...

Raise the Baseline by Reducing the Cost of Control

One of the most successful techniques for enterprise security in many organizations is to create a universal baseline of controls that...

Taking Inventories to the Next Level - Reconciliation and Triangulation

We know it is important to have good inventories across all of the assets we care about in an enterprise. For security purposes this is,...

Security Budgets - Supply and Demand Thinking

How you obtain and manage a budget to drive an adequate level of security is immensely important. Yet, it is one of the least discussed...

Cybersecurity Workforce Development - Updated

It is still somewhat frustrating that most of the dialog about the skills shortage in cybersecurity focuses, perhaps inevitably, on the...

Tips for Running a Risk Committee

In any sizable organization it is important to have some form of management steering group or committee to oversee your risk program. The...

Insider Threat - Blast Radius Perspective - Updated

Of the vast canon of insightful commentary that has come from Dan Geer over many years, one that especially stuck with me was his...

Cybersecurity and the Board : A Fresh Perspective?

How to represent cybersecurity (or technology / information risks more generally) to the Board is an ongoing subject of discussion in...

Compliance vs. Security

It is sad that many security discussions are so binary: that is, if you’re not wildly for something then you must be wildly against it....

Threat Intelligence - Updated

This is an update from a thread that became a post last year. Threat intelligence seems, at least to me, to get maligned too much. For...

Security Leadership: A-grades vs. Pass/Fail

The underlying secret of most great security leaders and teams is one thing: the ability to know what needs to be done really well vs....