Russell Thomas and a bunch of his friends recently posted a research paper called How Bad Is It? – A Branching Activity Model to Estimate the Impact of Information Security Breaches, which attempts to provide a structure for estimating the impact of a breach. This work is necessary – we have no benchmarks, or even consensus, about what breached organizations should even be counting.

This is an academic research paper, and to be honest I am not a big fan of academic papers. I have pretty bad TL;DR syndrome. But I did check out the introduction, and noted some interesting tidbits.

Empirical research on breach losses often use ad hoc taxonomies for “quantified” and “non-quantified” costs as part of surveys or interviews of subject matter experts. There is no theoretical basis for these taxonomies, which limits their generality and research significance.

Finally, several consulting firms publish survey-based studies. Most notable is the “Cost of a Data Breach” reports by Ponemon Institute (Ponemon Institute 2012). These survey results are widely publicized and widely quoted, even in policy discussions, but they have no foundation in theoretical or empirical academic research, and they have very serious methodological flaws (Thomas 2011a)

In summary, without some reliable and robust breach impact estimation methods, quantified information security will continue to be a “weak hypothesis” (Verendel 2009).

This is true. It warms my cockles (can I say that out loud?) that these guys are calling out survey monkeys like Ponemon because the industry seems set on using those numbers to justify what we do.

But I have to say I’m a little disappointed by Russell’s attempt to jump on the indicators of compromise bandwagon in his New School blog post on the paper. He unnecessarily concocts a meaningless description of this breach impact estimation model by mentioning Indicators of Impact. Huh? Total non-sequitur, though I do understand the desire to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of the phrase Indicators of XXX.

But let’s call this what it is. An attempt to build an academically rigorous model to estimate the cost of a breach, based upon factors that can be reasonably estimated and quantified. It would be nice to see this kind of stuff added to GRC platforms and the like, to enable us to track and estimate these costs. Ultimately I believe that as we mature as a profession we will need this kind of research to help define a common vernacular for estimating loss.

Photo credit: “Impact Hoodie Design for 2006” originally uploaded by Will Foster

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