There are a lot of terms in cybersecurity and three (3) of the top misused terms are:
Before diving into that discussion, it is important to baseline some underlying concepts that come into play when describing "What is meant by managing risk?" Risk management is the coordinated activities which optimize the management of potential opportunities and adverse effects. The alternative to risk management is crisis management. Risk management provides a way of realizing potential opportunities without exposing an organization to unnecessary peril.
In the context of cybersecurity risk management practices, “risk” is defined as:
In the context of this definition of risk, it is important to define underlying components of this risk definition:
One important concept to understand is that risk is variable - it changes and is not static. The implication is that risk ratings are subject to change as the operating environment changes.
In the context of the cybersecurity risk management practices, “threat” is defined as:
Risks and threats both tie into cybersecurity and data protection controls, but it is important to understand the differences:
If you want to learn for about threats vs vulnerabilities vs risks, we have a page that describes that in greater detail.
According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)™ Guide:
Risk appetite is more of a management statement, where it is subjective in nature. Similar in concept to how a policy is a "high-level statement of management intent," an organization's stated risk appetite is a high-level statement of how all, or certain types of, risk are willing to be accepted. Risk appetites exist as a guiderail from an organization's executive leadership to inform personnel about what is and is not acceptable, in terms of risk management. Using a review of current risk status vs target risk appetites can be useful to see how well cybersecurity practices operate to clearly see what practice areas deviate from expectations.
Examples of an organization stating its risk appetite:
It is important to know that in many immature risk programs, risk appetite statements are divorced from reality. Executive leaders mean well when they put out risk appetite statements, but the Business As Usual (BAU) practices routinely violate the risk appetite. This is often due to numerous reasons:
In a mature risk program, the results of risk assessments are evaluated with the organization's risk appetite in mind. For example, if the organization has a "moderate risk appetite" and there are several findings in a risk assessment that are high risk, then action must be taken to reduce the risk, since it cannot be accepted. Accepting a high risk would violate the moderate risk appetite set by management. In reality, that leaves remediation, transfering or avoiding as the remaining three (3) options.
From the previous graphic, when you look at it from a risk appetite perspective, For an organization that wants to follow a "moderate risk appetite," that establishes constraints for allowable and prohibited activities, based on the potential harm to the organization:
It is possible to identify a target risk appetite at a domain level, as well as an organizational level. This can be visualized with a spider / radar diagram, as shown below:
Unline risk appetite, risk tolerance is objective in nature. While risk appetite is conceptual, risk tolerance is based on objective criteria. Defining objective criteria is a necessary step to be able to categorize risk on a graduated scale. Establishing objective criteria to quantify the impact of a risk enables risk assessments to leverage that same criteria and assist decision-makers in their risk management decisions (e.g., accept, mitigate, transfer or avoid).
From a graduated scale perspective, it is possible to define "tolerable" risk criteria to create a few useful categories of risk:
The objective criteria that goes into defining what constitutes a low, moderate, high, severe or extreme risk includes:
The six (6) categories of IE are:
The six (6) categories of OL are:
There are three (3) general approaches are commonly employed to estimate OL:
Risk thresholds are directly tied to risk tolerance. As the graphic at the top of the page depicts, there is a threshold between the different levels of risk tolerance. By establishing thresholds, it brings the "graduated scale perspective" to life.
Let's take a look at a theoretical company, ACME, that is experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to strengthen its products and/or services, ACME's long-standing risk appetite is relatively conservative, where ACME draws a hard line that any risk over moderate is unacceptable. Additionally, ACME has no tolerance for any activities that could harm its customers.
Given the changes necessary to ramp up both talent and technology to put the apporporate solutions in place to meet ACME's deadlines, there are gaps/deficiencies. When the risk management team assesses the associated risks, the results identify a range of risks from high to extreme. The reason for this is simply due to the higher occurence likelihood of emergent behaviors that potentially could harm individuals (e.g., catastrophic impact effect). The results were objective and tell a compelling story that there is a realistic chance of significant damage to ACME's reputation.
With those results, it is a management decision. What does ACME's CEO / Board of Directors (BoD) do?
If the CEO/BoD proceeds with accepting the risk, is it violating its fiduciary duties, since it is accepting risk it previously deemed unacceptable? Additionally, would ACME be considered negligent for accepting high, severe or extreme risk (e.g., would a rational individual under similar circumstances make the same decision?)?
These are all very real topics that need to be considered and how risk is managed has significant legal and financial implications.
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