Page 21 - Cyber Defense eMagazine March 2024

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How does this translate to practice?

Until now, it’s been like buying all the ingredients for a delicious cake but not taking charge of making
one. The ingredients were left in the cupboard, some used, some not, some redundant, some expired,
with no oversight as to what was needed, how they were ultimately used and if the cake, in the end, was
good or not.

In security terms, this means the CISO’s office procures all the needed controls such as endpoint
protection tools or code protection, but the security leadership doesn't have the ability to understand if
they have been implemented, and if they have – how well they are working. That’s because more often
than not, today’s security teams have no visibility into how their policies are being enforced. They have
no way to measure their activation (have they been deployed?), their scan cycles (at what pace are they
working?) and whether critical events are resolved (how well are they performing against our policy?).

The ability for a CISO or a security leader to govern, manage, and measure how their operations are
performing is getting bigger and top of mind. Finally, the industry is recognizing that CISOs do not have
the tools they need in order to do the management part of their job.

There are many drivers for this, beginning with the complexity of their operations. Every company that
needs to be compliant with SoC2/type is likely to manage at least 15 different security tools. The stack
can reach over 100 tools when it comes to major enterprises. Even mid-size companies that might have
gone through an M&A process are likely to have a few dozens of segregated tools.

Secondly, accountability is on the rise for the CISO and with it new liabilities and expectations. In May
2023, Uber’s CISO Joe Sullivan became the first CISO to be convicted for a US company breach and a
new definition of accountability unsettled the CISO community. Six months later the Solarwinds CISO
was convicted of fraud, accused of failing to implement adequate security controls, among other things.

And lastly, new technologies around security data consolidation for management purposes are
introducing the pathway for data-driven insights and therefore data-driven security leadership.

I believe the NIST CSF 2.0’s new govern function will further foster a new data-driven security
management approach that entails several key and practical changes:

• Transparency to the operational tools – whereas an ops leader or an analyst looks inwards to
remediating an event or a vulnerability, security leaders ask themselves several different
questions. For instance: how well are the recent tools we procured enrolled, or which business
unit needs my assistance to better adopt the new controls?

• Multi-disciplinary mindset – today a CISO’s office oversees between 10 to 14 different security
programs, each one with very distinctive languages, capabilities and measurements that are led
by dedicated SMEs. In the CISO’s office, one needs to adopt simple and clear language,
measurements and policies that would be agnostic to the tools, easy to comprehend, and offer a
clear understanding of what the needed action items are when the security policies aren’t met.

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