Governance and Policy in Practice

Part 4. Rethinking cybersecurity from the viewpoint of risk   There are two principles to planning good governance: you automate away toil to ensure reliability and quality, but you never automate decision-making. We always have to know and take responsibility for our basic intent.    Having security policies (actually policies in general) is bread and […]

Policy Bow Ties and Risk Based Policy

Part 3. Rethinking cybersecurity from the viewpoint of risk   Policy is the centrepiece of both cybersecurity and risk management. Having a policy, as well as knowing it and understanding it, is the way to be prepared for the inevitable–whatever that may be. If you don’t know your intentions well enough to be able to […]

Digital Risk Management By Promise

Part 2. Rethinking cybersecurity from the viewpoint of risk The ability to estimate risk presumes a certain level of insight into relationships, both technical and human. Yet, too much has been made of the idea that trust itself is our enemy.  It’s a simplistic argument, pushed by cybersecurity hardliners, which leans on the trite Russian […]

Risk Paralysis and Cyber-insecurity

Part 1. Rethinking cybersecurity from the viewpoint of risk Did we get cybersecurity wrong? Thirty years after the infamous Internet Worm was loosed upon an unsuspecting world, ravaging the global computing network of 1988 in a matter of hours, we seem to have made little or no progress in protecting computer systems against intentional attack. […]

Airspace Vulnerabilities in Healthcare

Wireless adoption is quickly emerging in every industry vertical that is using digitalization to simplify operations. The issue is that from a security perspective, the move to wireless creates situations where a “trusted” internal network suddenly bridge to an external network and can accessed wirelessly. What might have been an acceptable risk, where only a […]

Why Should You Care about Cyber Threat and Risk Assessment?

Cyber risks are evolving fast and organizations need to deal with them in more efficient ways. This requires an all-inclusive and agile approach to identifying threats and then eliminating or mitigating them. Orchestra Group’s Harmony IoT and Harmony Purple enable comprehensive cyber risk assessment and management for all sizes of enterprises. Harmony IoT provides outside-in […]

Risk Based Vulnerability Management

Cyber defense is moving to a risk management and operations paradigm (see previous posts on effective cyber risk management and policy based cyber risk management). One aspect of risk management as a cyber defense strategy is risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM). Risk-based vulnerability management is a proactive cyber defense strategy used to prioritize mitigation of cyber […]

SOAR vs. XIP – Reactive to Proactive Cyber Security Operations

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework identifies five functions (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover) as the five primary pillars for a successful cybersecurity program. These functions focus on cybersecurity management at a high level and define both proactive (i.e., protect before the attack – or left-of-bang) and reactive (i.e., response after the attack – or right-of-bang) […]

Risk of Delay

Many organizations have security policies that have an associated time frame. For example a patch policy could be that a patch must be applied to a vulnerable server within a specific timeframe. It makes sense since timely patching is an important security control – but patching can have a business impact (the need to reboot […]