Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The first Aviation ISAC summit, a little over a decade ago, was about forty people in a room in Miami, hosted by the Health ISAC. This year’s conference in Vancouver hosted more than five hundred: airlines, airports, OEMs, suppliers, and government, all in one place for three days. Many in the audience were new to the conference. One of the opening speakers asked first-timers to raise their hands, and a lot of hands went up around the room.

Cybersecurity programs have become increasingly specialized and become a rather expansive enterprise responsibility. Protecting a modern organization can involve identity, endpoints, networks, applications and APIs, cloud infrastructure, data, threat intelligence, detection and response, governance, risk and compliance (GRC), incident response, and cyber resilience. Each discipline brings specialized technologies, processes, and expertise to the security program.

Plenty of material explains what ISO/IEC 42001 contains. Clause by clause, control by control, with a checklist of documents to prepare. The standard itself is a management system specification rather than a control catalogue, and the distinction is where audit preparation goes wrong. ‍ The checklists share one omission.

A model built on industry data produces an industry answer. The obvious next step is to calibrate it to the specific environment, and the obvious place to start is the threat picture, because every organization believes its own is distinctive. ‍ It is the wrong parameter to start with. Some inputs should stay general, some must be local, and the ones that must be local are the harder ones to observe, which is why they get left at a default. ‍

The usual case for governance return is that it speeds up enterprise sales, because buyers ask security questions and a prepared answer closes faster. It is true and it is the weaker argument. ‍ The stronger one is loss avoidance, and almost nobody makes it, because it needs a loss figure that most governance programs do not have. What makes it affordable is a distinction between two kinds of evidence. ‍

A correlation rule can be tuned. The window can be widened, the join key improved, a source promoted from optional to required. Each of those is a parameter with a defensible setting. ‍ What remains after all of it is the residual, meaning the events that would produce a finding if a source existed for them, which is a form of residual risk expressed in detection terms. Naming it is the question an auditor asks after being shown a detection, and the answer is not a tuning exercise. ‍

A quantification exercise reports a one-in-hundred-year loss and the figure travels well. It sounds precise, it sounds severe, and everybody in the room believes they understand it. ‍ Most of them do not. The phrasing describes an annual probability and it reads as a statement about timing, and the two produce different decisions from the same number. ‍