Convincing Your Management, Your Peers, and Yourself That Risk Management Doesn’t Suck

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.