I am excited to be recognised as one of the Top 10 Cybersecurity Leaders in Australia driving innovation and demonstrating business value. Although relatively new to Australia, I had the opportunity to use my global experience to address key cybersecurity challenges within the Financial Services sector.
A massive thank you to my team – it’s a privilege to lead such high performing and dedicated individuals and be able to build a cutting-edge cyber capability. Congratulations to all the award winners!
Asset management is often regarded as the foundation of a security programme. You can’t protect something that you don’t know you have. This extends beyond internal systems to your organisation’s partners. Depending on the line of business, supply chains can get increasingly complex. They include vendors, manufacturers, retailers and distributors in multiple geographies and regulatory regimes. Securing such a network is no easy task and should start with visibility and careful risk management.
I previously wrote about the complexity of communication and the multi-faceted nature of the CISO role. Combining these perspectives, I would like to give an overview of what a communication strategy might look like for a security leader.
NISTIR 7756 Contextual Description of the CAESARS System
Knowing your existing assets, threats and countermeasures is a necessary step in establishing a starting point to begin prioritising cyber risk management activities. Indeed, when driving the improvement of the security posture in an organisation, security leaders often begin with getting a view of the effectiveness of security controls.
A common approach is to perform a security assessment that involves interviewing stakeholders and reviewing policies in line with a security framework (e.g. NIST CSF).
A report is then produced presenting the current state and highlighting the gaps. It can then be used to gain wider leadership support for a remediation programme, justifying the investment for security uplift initiatives. I wrote a number of these reports myself while working as a consultant and also internally in the first few weeks of being a CISO.
These reports have a lot of merits but they also have limitations. They are, by definition, point-in-time: the document is out of date the day after it’s produced, or even sooner. The threat landscape has already shifted, state of assets and controls changed and business context and priorities are no longer the same.
The worst time to write a security incident response plan is during an incident itself. Anticipating adverse events and preparing playbooks for likely scenarios and testing them in advance are important facets of a wider cyber resilience strategy.
Incident response, however, is not only about technology, logs and forensic investigation – managing communication is equally important. It is often a compliance requirement to notify the relevant regulator and customers about a data breach or a cyber incident, so having a plan, as well as an internal and external communication strategy, is key.
Security incidents can quickly escalate into a crisis depending on their scale and impact. There are lessons we can learn from other disciplines when it comes to crisis communication.
One of the best example is offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The resources, tools and training materials they have created and made available online for free have been tested in emergency situations around the world, including the latest Covid-19 pandemic.
CDC’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) manuals and templates emphasise the six core principles of crisis communication:
1. Be first. Quickly sharing information about an incident can help stop the spread, and prevent or reduce impact. Even if the cause is unknown, share facts that are available.
2. Be right. Accuracy establishes credibility. Information should include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the information gaps.
3. Be credible. Honesty, timeliness, and scientific evidence encourage the public to trust your information and guidance. Acknowledge when you do not have enough information to answer a question and then work with the appropriate experts to get an answer.
4. Express empathy. Acknowledging what people are feeling and their challenges shows that you are considering their perspectives when you give recommendations.
5. Promote action. Keep action messages simple, short, and easy to remember.
6. Show respect. Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport.
Cyber security professionals can adopt the above principles in crisis situations during a cyber incident, demonstrating commitment and competence and communicating with transparency and empathy both inside and outside of the organisation.
Building on my previous blogs on CISO responsibilities, initial priorities and developing information security strategy, I wanted to share an example of what a security dashboard might look like. It is important to communicate regularly with your stakeholders and sharing a status update like this might be one way of doing it. The dashboard incorporates a high-level view of a threat landscape, top risks and security capabilities to address these risks (with maturity and projected progression for each). Feel free to use this as a starting point and adjust to your needs.
The dashboard above aligns to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework functions as structuring your security programme activities in this way, in my experience, allows for better communication with business stakeholders. However, capabilities can be adjusted to align with any other framework or your control set of choice. Some of the elements can be deliberately simplified further depending on your target audience.
Managing change and improving security culture should start with understanding the organisation, the people in it and what drives them.
In the case of cyber security, this begins with understanding why current security practices might not be effective and why people often find workarounds rather than follow security processes.
Security professionals have access to the amounts of data never seen before. Antivirus software, firewalls, data loss prevention solutions – they all generate a staggering amount of alerts.
Security operation centres and the underlying SIEM technology allow us to aggregate, correlate and make sense of these vast troves of data. We can create dashboards and metrics that might look slick and even be useful to security teams but do such data add value to business stakeholders? Do they tell a story to the Board?
Being a security leader is first and foremost acting as a trusted advisor to the business. This includes understanding its objectives and aligning your efforts to support and enable delivery on the wider strategy.
It is also about articulating cyber risks and opportunities and working with the executive team on managing them. This doesn’t mean, however, that your role is to highlight security weaknesses and leave it to the board to figure it all out. Instead, being someone they can turn to for advice is the best way to influence the direction and make the organisation more resilient in combating cyber threats.
For your advice to be effective, you first need to earn the right to offer it. One of the best books I’ve read on the subject is The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister. It’s not a new book and it’s written from the perspective of a professional services firm but that doesn’t mean the lessons from it can’t be applied in the security context. It covers the mindset, attributes and principles of a trusted advisor.
Unsurprisingly, the major focus of this work is on developing trust. The author summarises his views on this subject in the trust equation:
It’s a simple yet powerful representation of what contributes to and hinders the trust building process.
It’s hard to trust someone’s recommendations when they don’t put our interests first and instead are preoccupied with being right or jump to solutions without fully understanding the problem.
Equally, as important credibility is, the long list of your professional qualifications and previous experience on its own is not sufficient to be trustworthy. Having courage and integrity, following through on your promises and active listening, among other things are key. In the words of Maister, “it is not enough to be right, you must also be helpful”.
Unlike the FBI’s Hostage Negotiation Team, cyber security professionals are rarely involved in high-stakes negotiations involving human life. But that doesn’t mean they can’t use some of the techniques developed by them to apply it to improve security culture, overcome resistance and guide organisational change.
Behind the apparent simplicity, this model is a tried and tested way to influence human behaviour over time. The crux of it is that you can’t skip any steps as consecutive efforts build on the previous ones. The common mistake many cyber security professionals make is they jump straight to Influence or Behavioral change with phishing simulations or security awareness campaigns but this can be counterproductive.
As explained in the original paper, it is recommended to invest time in active listening, empathy and establishing rapport first. In the security context, this might mean working with the business stakeholders to understand their objectives and concerns, rather than sowing fear of security breaches and regulatory fines.
All of this doesn’t mean you have to treat every interaction like a hostile negotiation or treat your business executives as violent felons. The aim is to build trust to be able to best support the business not manipulate your way into getting your increased budget signed off.I cover some techniques in The Psychology of Information Security – feel free to check it out if you would like to learn more.
Cyber Security Leadership 