In a world full of TLAs (three letter acronyms), none resonates for security people as strongly as FUD. Or Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt for you n00bs. Many of us rail at the offensive use of FUD in security sales. But let’s take a step back and acknowledge that security is like insurance. With very rare exceptions, security doesn’t help anyone sell more stuff. It doesn’t really help companies operate more efficiently. It’s basically about controlling downside risk.

So it’s like insurance. You don’t buy health insurance because you want to. It doesn’t add anything to your life. It prevents you from going belly up if you have some catastrophic issue. It can maybe cut your medical bills if you are chronically ill or injury prone. But clearly you buy insurance because you feel you need to, not because you want to.

Insurance brokers (at least all those I’ve dealt with) also leverage FUD in their sales cycle. They paint the picture of downside risk, which always involves preying on some fear of getting hurt, sick, etc. If I had a crystal ball and knew I (or anyone in my family) wouldn’t get sick, I’d drop health insurance like a hot potato. And your senior management is in exactly the same boat. If they thought there was no risk of losing protected data or intellectual property, you’d be out on your ass.

So there will always be some level of FUD in our activities as security folks. I talked about using FUD as an end user a few years back, as well as more recently. So there can be legitimate uses of FUD to create urgency and provide a catalyst for funding. But let’s stay focused on security vendors using FUD to get you to buy their stuff. I realize it’s part of the game and I have accepted that. I don’t like it, but I accept it. But that doesn’t mean all FUD is created equal.

So let’s attempt to break FUD down into a couple categories and (with your help) understand the impact of each type of FUD on the sales cycle. In this post, I’ll break down the categories of FUD we see most frequently. I started this discussion last week on Twitter, and got some great feedback. Hopefully we’ll get some more feedback on the blog (You! Yes, you! Get over to the blog and add some comments!) and come to some consensus about which kinds of FUD are common in practice.

Then we’ll put together a survey to see if we can get some level of understanding about what is acceptable FUD vs. unacceptable. Dare I say it – maybe even useful FUD. In a perfect world, all our friends in the vendor community would take this feedback to heart and stop slinging bad FUD. Oy, such optimism.

So here goes (in no particular order):

  • Attack du jour press release: You know what I’m talking about here because these press releases show up in your inbox just about every day. This is the “you can stop StuxNet with our box” type release, where the vendor is trying to capitalize on some external event to get you to answer the phone. Similar to getting a call for travel insurance just after an airliner goes down.
  • Threat reports: Almost every vendor has some kind of research capability now, so these reports basically list out which attacks and/or vulnerabilities they are seeing. Maybe they throw in some trend analysis as well. The idea is to keep your attention on common attacks, which are then addressed by the vendor’s widget or service.
  • Breach reports: These reports are different from threat reports in that the objective is to actually study breaches – in an attempt to pinpoint both the breach’s impact and root causes. With this analysis a vendor/service provider hopes to educate potential customers on what causes breaches and how to address the risks (hopefully with their own products/services). Of course, the Verizon Data Breach report is the granddaddy of this kind of analysis. Check out Rich’s analysis of the 2010 report.
  • Vendor surveys/peer group FUD: If you are a CISO, you get probably a dozen calls/emails a week to fill out one survey or another. Do you do this? Have you suffered from that? The vendors and researchers (like Ponemon) then assemble the data to build a case about what the masses are doing, or more likely aren’t doing. James McGovern accurately called this peer group FUD because it tries to trigger action by pointing out that either buddies friends are (or aren’t) doing something specific, and therefore you should. This also applies to the Security Benchmarking research I’m doing right now.
  • Making security/compliance easy: One of my personal favorites: you still see vendors market events and position products with promises that using their gear will make either security or compliance (or both!) easy. And if you aren’t using their gear, your life is unnecessarily hard.
  • Sponsored lab tests: You tend to see this kind of FUD during the sales cycle, when a vendor tries to convince you they are great and the competitor is crap, because the vendor paid some guy in a lab to run a test to which demonstrated something attractive about the vendor’s product or service. Some publications also run lab tests which straddle the line. It’s rare for money to directly change hands, but there can be backroom ad-buying hijinx. Our legal budget is rather limited so I won’t name names – these folks tend to be rather litigious – but you know who I’m talking about.
  • Competitor sniping: Don’t you love it when vendors come in, and spend more time talking about why their competitors suck than about why they are good and how they can help you? Yeah, I hate that too. That’s competitor sniping in all its seedy glory.
  • Cost of breach/attack analysis: We also see folks (like Larry Ponemon) who have built great businesses doing more targeted surveys, trying to understand what these security/compliance/breach issues actually cost companies. Clearly the idea is to derive an objective number that you (the practitioner) can use internally to talk about how bad it would be if something unfortunate were to happen. Yes, this is fuel for internal FUD, but it’s an important part of the game.

As you can see, I’m mixing in security marketing tactics with FUD. More precisely, I refuse to draw a distinction between the two. This is because very few security companies focus on customer benefits, instead preferring to indiscriminately sling FUD.

So there it is. 8 distinct types of FUD. Let me know if I missed anything or if I overstretched the meaning of FUD, and you think a category should be eliminated. Later this week I’ll put together the definitive FUD survey. Then you can weigh in with your love/hate for FUD.

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