How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk

A ground shaking exposé on the failure of popular cyber risk management methods

How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk exposes the shortcomings of current “risk management” practices, and offers a series of improvement techniques that help you fill the holes and ramp up security. In his bestselling book How to Measure Anything, author Douglas W. Hubbard opened the business world’s eyes to the critical need for better measurement. This book expands upon that premise and draws from The Failure of Risk Management to sound the alarm in the cybersecurity realm. Some of the field’s premier risk management approaches actually create more risk than they mitigate, and questionable methods have been duplicated across industries and embedded in the products accepted as gospel. This book sheds light on these blatant risks, and provides alternate techniques that can help improve your current situation. You’ll also learn which approaches are too risky to save, and are actually more damaging than a total lack of any security.

Dangerous risk management methods abound; there is no industry more critically in need of solutions than cybersecurity. This book provides solutions where they exist, and advises when to change tracks entirely.

• Discover the shortcomings of cybersecurity’s “best practices”
• Learn which risk management approaches actually create risk
• Improve your current practices with practical alterations
• Learn which methods are beyond saving, and worse than doing nothing

Insightful and enlightening, this book will inspire a closer examination of your company’s own risk management practices in the context of cybersecurity. The end goal is airtight data protection, so finding cracks in the vault is a positive thing—as long as you get there before the bad guys do. How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk is your guide to more robust protection through better quantitative processes, approaches, and techniques.

Table of Contents

Part I Why Cybersecurity Needs Better Measurements for Risk
Chapter 1 The One Patch Most Needed in Cybersecurity
Chapter 2 A Measurement Primer for Cybersecurity
Chapter 3 Model Now! An Introduction to Practical Quantitative Methods for Cybersecurity
Chapter 4 The Single Most Important Measurement in Cybersecurity
Chapter 5 Risk Matrices, Lie Factors, Misconceptions, and Other Obstacles to Measuring Risk

Part II Evolving the Model of Cybersecurity Risk
Chapter 6 Decompose It Unpacking the Details
Chapter 7 Calibrated Estimates How Much Do You Know Now?
Chapter 8 Reducing Uncertainty with Bayesian Methods
Chapter 9 Some Powerful Methods Based on Bayes

Part III Cybersecurity Risk Management for the Enterprise
Chapter 10 Toward Security Metrics Maturity
Chapter 11 How Well Are My Security Investments Working Together?
Chapter 12 A Call to Action How to Roll Out Cybersecurity Risk Management

Appendix A Selected Distributions
Appendix B Guest Contributors