The Risky Business Of Managing Risk

[The following is a summary of "The Risky Business of Managing Risk," a new retrospective of recent Dark Reading coverage posted this week on Dark Reading's Risk Management Tech Center.]

One of the challenges that security teams face is the problem of measuring, evaluating and mitigating risk in the enterprise. In this special compendium of recent Dark Reading coverage, we look back at the latest developments in risk management:

* A study sponsored by Tripwire and conducted by the Ponemon institute found that while 81% of security and risk professionals in the U.S. said their organizations have a significant commitment to risk-based security management, less than 30% actually have a formal security risk management strategy that is applied consistently across the enterprise.

* The effectiveness of data classification and retention policies can have strong ripple effects across an organization's entire IT risk management framework. After all, how data is classified can determine what risk management priorities are placed on it, and the less data that is retained long-term, the less volume the organization has to sift through to determine appropriate protection levels.

* Telephony denial of service (TDoS) attacks -- which earlier this year were becoming prevalent enough that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about a threat of TDoS attacks on public sector entities in an attempt to extort money -- are typically similar in motivation and goals as DDoS attacks that flood networks, websites or other servers with massive volumes of traffic meant to bring an organization's data structure to its knees. Call centers are the most popular TDoS targets -- they're easy to contact and flood with calls -- and, increasingly, there are more tools readily available tools for launching these attacks on any organizationor individual's location.

* A growing need for security discipline and the availability of better threat data are changing the monolithic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) concept into a near-term enterprise risk management project, experts say. GRC, a methodology for building global IT policies, priorities, and practices around key risk and compliance factors, has long been viewed as a framework that was too complex and resource-intensive for all but the largest enterprises. But driven by a need to improve security and add some means of measuring risk, many businesses are pushing past these old perceptions and implementing elements of the technology, without necessarily tagging their efforts with the GRC name.

* Enterprises have increasingly found that their vendors and other third parties are putting shared information at risk, but the disconnect between procurement professionals and IT risk managers has made it difficult to address information security risks during the vendor contract process. What's more, the volume of vendor contracts in the enterprise would make it prohibitively expensive to simply put all vendors on the hook for the same information security requirements. That is why many IT risk management professionals advocate for better integrating supply-chain information risk management into the vendor management process.

To read the full text of these and other recent risk-related Dark Reading stories, download the free report.

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