Brothers in Risk

I write about risk, threat, and other security definitions fairly regularly. Lo and behold I just read a post by someone else who shares my approach. This is a must read. How did you react to the story?

A second brother in risk is Gunnar Peterson, who writes in part:

When security teams conflate threats and vulnerabilities, the result is confusion. Instead efforts dealing with threats... and vulnerabilities... should be separately optimized, besides both being part of "security"; they don't have that much in common.

Oh bravo, especially the old school link to Dan Geer which I should read again.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks Richard!

I've been enjoying the metrics thread, btw...
7:56 PM
Anonymous said…
That was a nice little vignette. I especially liked the paragraph on value, which in my opinion is the most ignored portion of the risk equation. Unfortunately once you get away from some of the core or highly used infrastructure extracting the actual value of an asset can be difficult. Especially when you have implicit dependencies e.g. an alerting system which relies on it's own mail server that is rarely used.

A good way to gauge value is to theoretically remove the asset from the network and try to determine what fails or to actually do that if you can "risk" it. Please excuse the pun.
8:00 PM
Anonymous said…
Thanks Richard, for more concrete info for those of us "in the trenches". It's so hard to find USEFUL info sometimes that it almost makes me want to find another career path. I totally agree that it's vital that we as security professionals use a common taxonomy to avoid confusion and loss of credibility. Your blog is the first thing I check in the morning-I hope to take one of classes someday, but since I'm way out here in Hawaii, I might have to settle for your books...
12:34 PM
Anonymous said…
Thanks for the nice post!
5:23 PM
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