Cyber Insurance: How would I decide to buy it…

Is Cyber Insurance right for you?

Wow a big question, right? I can’t answer this for you, obviously I’d recommend that you consider cyber insurance, however I’d also recommend that you:

Understand your business and it’s supply chain with regards to financials and linkages to cyber risk
Understand your current cyber asset, threat, vulnerability and therefore risk landscape
Ensure you have a good understanding to make informed decisions

I’m not going to write lots this evening on the subject, but I was reviewing a report and thought in line with some research that I started recently (but was side-tracked) and then have seen the report so purchased that instead! (Sometimes it’s easier to not do everything yourself right!)

Vulnerability Management Concerns by Role Type

Have you ever thought about what kind of data/intelligence you may need with regards to vulnerability management? It tends to vary at levels of abstraction based on the audiance, but don’t think the person doing the patching may not be considernig upwards or that someone in a C level position won’t care about the zeros and ones (life doesn’t work that way!)

Anyway I was talking to a friend and came up with these so thought I’d share them with the world. Have I done a decent job? can you think of others? How do you measure and report? What are your concerns?

Let’s take a look at what I came up with (this wasn’t a very long time in the making 😉 )

UK NCSC Active Cyber Defence (ACD)

Defending a single server is often far more complex than people apreciate, defending a single organisation is significantly harder than a single server, defending a country… a much more complex challenge than I think people actually realise.

What is ACD?

According to the NCSC:

The aim of ACD is to “Protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.” We do this through a wide range of mechanisms, which at their core have the ability to provide protection at scale.
ACD is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, rather than the highly sophisticated and targeted attacks, which NCSC deal with in other ways.
UK NCSC

NCSC Active Cyber Defence

What is included?

The UK NCSC offer and run a range of Active Cyber Defence capabilities which include the following:

Board Level Security Metrics

Everyone always asks what are the best security metrics to have? The answer is simple to me, use metrics that are valuable to your business governance and decision-making processes! Easy right.

Not so easy in real life right!

Pew Pew Maps – Cool graphics bro

Ever want to be MORE cyber? Need to impress the board? Want to look 1337 AF? Worry not we have your back! Here is a collection of CYBER MAPS to project on your wall mounted displays!

Cyber Leadership

Myth: you must be a “techie” to lead in the CYBERS

Ok so you might be sitting here going… but Dan you send pews and do “techy” stuff… do you not lead? Well, I mean I do all kinds of things, I write business cases, I play with spreadsheets (fun right!), I integrate systems and look at data and sometimes write really bad code! (hey, the pews aren’t going to send themselves!) but… I want to talk about some realities here.

CYBER CYBER CYBER – What cyber means for the…

I’m sitting here drinking a cup of tea and thought I’d jot down some of the things I tend to think about. I figured this might help people consider aspects of “cyber” that they might not have considered before.

Stop rushing for “the solution”!

Before you start solutioning

Everyone these days seems to rush towards “the solution”, well as someone who now has few years under their belt, I’d advise people slow down a little and think about their business requirements, outcomes, current state, and constraints. Significantly as well think about how a service will run over a period, not just how to buy it and “fling it into production”.

Security Myths and Bad Advice

It must be good, someone posted about it on LinkedIn!

Ok this isn’t my normal jam, normally I’d just write something that’s hopefully good advice/practise and that would be that. But today let’s try something different!

This was inspired by a twitter convo which evolved into this: https://twitter.com/UK_Daniel_Card/status/1522138771789123584?s=20&t=dL9OkicTY2Orj5hfBtDvVQ

So… what are some cyber security myths that ended up being good practise or “good advice”? Well here’s what I came up with, supported by some awesome cyber community people!

Cyber Events vs Incident vs Attack

Cyber Events

Yesterday I was asked about “attack volumes” I see in the PwnDefend HoneyNet and it reminded me about what people think an “ATTACK” is and therefore spring my brain into thinking about how we as an industry communicate. Far too often I see “number of ATTACKS” being used my marketing/sales etc. where the numbers are simply ridiculous and not reflective of how offensive cyber operations actually work.

Let’s look at some examples:

“Gov. Greg Abbott warns Texas agencies seeing 10,000 attempted cyber attacks per minute from Iran”
Gov. Greg Abbott – article in the Texas Tribune by CASSANDRA POLLOCK