- assess the impact if an adverse event were to happen decide what could be done to control that impact as deemed necessary
Well formed risk statement includes:
- asset
- threat
- vulnerability
- mitigation
- impact
- probability
Systematic risk
- fire, theft, software bugs - mitigated through diversification
- predictable under stable circumstances Unsystematic risk
- recession, epidemics, protocol design errors
- come from sources that are difficult to predict
- operation of a business as a business
Examples:
- Treasury management (financial risk)
- holdings in bonds, futures, currencies, etc
- Revenue management
- Contract management
- Fraud
- deliberate deception
- Regulatory
- Business continuity
- Technology
- technology used in development process as well as software functionality
Examples:
- Security - protective attributes
- Privacy - attributes that define access/sharing
- Project risk management
- Change management
- 📝 best method for managing risk in software
- 📝 Understanding environment and risk and applying controls should be owned by development team
Three classes:
- Administrative
- Technical
- Physical
For each class, there are four types of controls
- Preventative
- Detective
- Corrective
- Compensating
- primary control
- proactive
- best mitigation
- goal: stop attack
Examples:
- separation of duties
- adequate documentation
- physical control over assets
- authorization mechanisms
- reactive
- goal: detect presence of attack
Examples:
- logs
- audits
- inventories
- after a vulnerability is exploited
- goal: reduce total impact
- when primary controls fail
- reactive
- defense in depth
Example: separation of duties is a preventitve control to prevent fraud, financial review of reports is an after the fact compensating control
- managing risk as part of a complete system
- Subjectively determine impact of an event - involves experts and group consensus
Two aspects: impact and probability
- assess failures and effects on the system
- for each issue, elements are defined
- severity of risk is defined (1-10)
- probability (1-10)
- detectability (1-10)
- calculate product (over 200 / 1000 worth looking at)
-
Objectively determine impact of an event - involves use of metrics and models
-
use historical loss and trends to predict future loss
-
highly dependent on historical loss data
-
assuming constant risk rate is not an agreed upon concept
key info:
- important to come to consensus on values being used
- use consistent values
- models can never replace judgement and experience, but can enhance decision making
📝 SLE = asset value * (exposure factor or duration)
📝 ARO = number of events / number of years covered
📝 ALE = SLE * ARO
- Absolute security is not achievable
Example:
- potential loss of $100k
- firewall blocks 95%
- IDS (intrustion detection system) is 80% effective
- IRT (incident response team) is 50% effective
- 100k * 95% + (5k * 80% * 50%) = 97k with 3k residual
- 📝 ROI % = (avoided loss - control cost) / control cost * 100
- 📝 ROI time = avoided annual loss / annual control cost
- Governance: sum of exective actions that manage risk
- need to comply with laws and regulations, so GRC terms are used synonomously
- Compliance: activities associated with external requirements (contractual, policy, strategic, industry, regulations, laws)
- Conformance: activities associated with internal requirements (org policies/standards)
- Compliance gets priority over conformance
- many reasons, primary being penalties
Two key legal issues with significant risk
- intellectual property
- legal action provides some protection but not against unknown criminals
- data breach
- established norms
- goal: define rules to ensure specified level of quality
- Asset identification
- includes classification
- Threat assessment
- threats and vulnerabilities for each asset
- likelihood of occurrence
- Impact determination and quantification
- Tangible: financial loss, physical damage
- Intangible: reputation
- Control design and evaluation
- Decide which controls to implement
- Residual Risk Management
- Identify additional controls needed to reduce residual risk
- Identify - list potential risks
- Analyze - impact, probability - classify and prioritize risks
- Plan - Decide actions to take and implement mitigation
- Track - Monitor and review risks and mitigations
- Control - make corrections as needed