A Logo

Feel free to include my content in your page via my
RSS feed

Help Irongeek.com pay for
bandwidth and research equipment:

Subscribestar or Patreon

Search Irongeek.com:

Affiliates:
Irongeek Button
Social-engineer-training Button

Help Irongeek.com pay for bandwidth and research equipment:

paypalpixle


Convincing Your Management, Your Peers, and Yourself That Risk Management Doesn't Suck - Josh Sokol (BSides Las Vegas 2013) (Hacking Illustrated Series InfoSec Tutorial Videos)

Convincing Your Management, Your Peers, and Yourself That Risk Management Doesn't Suck - Josh Sokol

As security professionals, almost every action we take comes down to making a risk-based decision.  Web application vulnerabilities, malware infections, physical vulnerabilities, and much more all boils down to some combination of the likelihood of an event happening and the impact of that event.  Risk management is a relatively simple concept to grasp, but the place where many practitioners fall down is in the tool set.  The lucky security professionals work for companies who can afford expensive GRC tools to aide in managing risk.  The unlucky majority out there usually end up spending countless hours managing risk via spreadsheets.  It's cumbersome, time consuming, and just plain sucks.  After starting a Risk Management program from scratch at a $1B/yr company, I ran into these same barriers and where budget wouldn't let me go down the GRC route, I finally decided to do something about it.  At BSides Las Vegas 2013, I would like to formally debut SimpleRisk, a simple and free tool to perform risk management activities.  Based entirely on open source technologies and sporting a Mozilla Public License 2.0, a SimpleRisk instance can be stood up in minutes and instantly provides the security professional with the ability to submit risks, plan mitigations, facilitate management reviews, prioritize for project planning, and track regular reviews.  It is highly configurable and includes dynamic reporting and the ability to tweak risk formulas on the fly.  It is under active development with new features being added all the time and can be downloaded for free or demoed at http://www.simplerisk.org. With a simple, powerful, and cost-effective tool and some basic risk management knowledge at your disposal, you too can become the security rock star that your business seeks out for risk-based decision making.  Let me show you how to convince your management, your peers, and yourself that Risk Management doesn't suck.

BIO: Josh Sokol, CISSP, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Computer Science in 2002.  Since that time, he has worked for several large companies including AMD and BearingPoint, spent some time as a military contractor, and is currently employed as the Information Security Program Owner at National Instruments.  In his current role, Josh manages all compliance, security architecture, risk management, and vulnerability management activities for NI.  Josh holds a CISSP certification and has spoken on dozens of security topics including the much hyped "HTTPSCan Byte Me" talk at BlackHat 2010.

 

Back to BSides Las Vegas 2013 video list

Printable version of this article

15 most recent posts on Irongeek.com:


If you would like to republish one of the articles from this site on your webpage or print journal please contact IronGeek.

Copyright 2020, IronGeek
Louisville / Kentuckiana Information Security Enthusiast