How to Answer the CEO and Board Attribution Question

Elements of the Q Model of Attribution, by Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan
Earlier today I Tweeted the following:

If you think CEOs & boards don't care about #attribution, you aren't talking to them or working w/them. The 1st question they ask is "who?"

I wrote this to convey the reality of incident response at the highest level of an organization. Those who run breached organizations want to know who is responsible for an intrusion.

As I wrote in Five Reasons Attribution Matters, your perspective on attribution changes depending on your role in the organization.

The question in the title of this blog post is, however, how does one answer the board? It's likely that the board and CEO will be asking the CIO or CISO "who." What should be the response?

My recommendation is to respond "how badly do you want to know?" Generally speaking, answering the attribution question is a function of the resources applied to the problem.

For example, I once performed an incident response for a Fortune 50 technology and retail company. They were so determined to identify the intruder that they hired former law enforcement officials, working as private investigators (PIs), to answer the question from the "physical world" perspective. In collaboration with local, federal, and foreign law enforcement officials, the PIs followed leads all the way to Romania. They performed surveillance on the suspect, interviewed his circle of associates, and eventually confirmed his involvement. Unfortunately for both the victim company and the perpetrator, the suspect disappeared. The suspect's family and friends believed that his "employer," an organized crime syndicate, decided the situation had gained too much publicity and that the suspect had become a liability.

The breached organization in my example decided to call in PIs and outside IR consultants once their annual loss rate exceeded $10 million. That was a CEO and board decision. The answer would affect how they conducted business, in a myriad of ways well outside that of IT or information security.

Clearly not every intrusion is going to merit PIs, IR consultants, international legal cooperation, and so on. However, some cases do merit that attention, and attribution can be done.

To more fully answer the question, I strongly recommend reading Attributing Cyber Attacks by Dr Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan. They discuss the merits of attribution and the importance of communication, as depicted in their Q model.

I know some CEOs and board members read this blog. Other readers work in different capacities. Both points of view are relevant, as mentioned in my previous blog post. I hope this post helps those in the technical world to understand the thought process of those in the nontechnical world.

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