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Need to measure cybersecurity risks
Need to measure cybersecurity risks

June 13, 2021

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Every time there’s another massive cybersecurity breach, which like SolarWinds finds its roots in a security issue at a third party, policymakers and security experts ask, “Where do we go from here?” 

 

The private sector and they government haven’t figured out how agencies can best address risks posed by their vendors. The problem is especially acute for small- and mid-sized organizations. Individually engaging, evaluating and auditing every vendor, from custodial services to cloud providers, is cost prohibitive and unrealistic for the vast majority. 

 

One thing is clear: What we are doing is not working. Our check-the-box approach to third-party risk neither improves the security of suppliers nor effectively informs the recipients of software and services about its real risk. What’s worse, it’s still practically impossible to determine just how effective our efforts are.

 

Today, those of us in cybersecurity are just like medieval barbers doing our best not to kill our patients. We struggle to know if an organization was breached due to poor security or if it was doing everything right and was simply overpowered by a nation-state.

 

We must start creating clear incentives to measure risk and share information about attacks.

 

It is impossible to know if we are moving forward if we cannot measure outcomes. Without information, we cannot reward good behavior. Developing ways to measure and report risk via trusted, objective security key performance indicators will lead to better approaches to cybersecurity and ultimately lower risk systemically.

 

Government-provided incentives, such as procurement preferences, can drive real improvements, but public- and private-sector organizations need objective measurements to ensure progress and not just activity for the sake of activity. 

 

Of course, objective measurement and effective cybersecurity decision-making requires access to data about risk. Liability concerns about sharing data can hamper this effort. Cybersecurity is one field where catastrophic failure and damage are hidden and protected by non-disclosure agreements, drastically reducing our ability to learn from our mistakes and compile sufficient actuarial data to understand the true nature of the risks we all face.

 

Source: GCN


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PremKumarit

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