Risk Archives

Risk

IT Risk And The Zombie Apocalypse: Surviving The Onslaught

October 15, 2013 Paul Roberts

One of the most vexing problems that faces IT organizations these days is how to measure their relative risk of being hacked or otherwise attacked. This sounds like pretty dry stuff, but it’s not. Failing to adequately account for your risks and exposure can mean the difference between swatting away an annoying intrusion attempt, and watching as foreign competitors or nation-states siphon off your critical intellectual property, bleeding your company of its competitiveness. But raising the alarm about this is always a tricky matter. Soft pedal it, and nobody takes you seriously. Scream from the rafters and …well…you’re screaming from the rafters. My friend and former colleague Josh Corman, however, found a good metaphor for the whole affair: the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. It’s all a bit of fun – though Mr. Corman is dead serious about the zombie stuff. Still, the idea is simple: attacks on your network and those of […]

When Autonomous Vehicles Crash, Is The Software Liable?

October 11, 2013 Paul Roberts

Many industries are wrestling with the blinding speed of technologic change. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are transforming the way employees work and customers interact with a business. And that doesn’t even take into account the (coming) revolution of smart devices and remote sensors that is referred to as The Internet of Things. But few industries are wrestling as hard with the implications of that change as the Insurance industry, which must assess the long-term impact of huge forces like technology innovation or, say, climate change on risk. One example: how will the advent of autonomous vehicles or even computer augmented driving change the auto insurance business? And, when two computer-guided cars crash, who (or what) is liable? Those were some of the questions posed to attendees at this week’s Emerging Technology (or EmTech) Conference at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speaker, Joe Coray, is the Vice […]

Sharing Threat Intelligence To Sort Out Targeted Attacks

September 14, 2013 Paul Roberts

Headlines about “advanced persistent threats” and targeted attacks have organizations of all sizes concerned. Barely a week goes by without news of a new, stealthy campaign targeting executives, government leaders or platforms used by prominent organizations. But while APT-style and targeted attacks may have the attention of the boardroom, organizations still face a Herculean task determining when an attack they’ve detected is targeted, and when it is merely indiscriminate. To help answer that question, I “hung out” with two experts in detecting and analyzing malicious threats to enterprises. Anup Ghosh is the CEO and co-founder of Invincea, which makes malware detection tools that isolate threats on endpoints. Matt Hartley is the Senior Director, Intelligence Lab Services at iSIGHT Partners, a cyber threat intelligence firm. Both told me that, while targeted attacks are on the rise, awareness about them is also at an all time high. That can, sometimes, result in organizations […]

BitSight: A Equifax For Security Risk?

September 10, 2013 Paul Roberts

I’ve opined in these pages and elsewhere that one of the big problems in the IT security space is the absence of actionable data. After all, problems like denial of service attacks, network compromises and inadvertent data leaks are all just risks that organizations and individuals must grapple with in our increasingly wired world. True – they’re new kinds of risks, but otherwise they’re not fundamentally different from problems like auto accidents, property crime or illness – things that we do a good job accounting for. The difference, as I see it, is an absence of accepted and independent means of assessing the relative security posture of any organization. IT security is still so much dark magic: we rely on organizations to tell us about how secure they are. Organizations, in turn, rely on a complex and patchy network of security monitoring and detection tools, then try to read the […]