The updated and expanded edition of the "Cybersecurity Leadership Handbook for the CISO and the CEO" released in February 2023
A selection of key articles from veteran infosec thought-leader and Corix Partners Founder JC Gaillard, an essential handbook for all leaders around cybersecurity and a compendium of good advice, looking beyond the technology horizon, into corporate organization, management, governance, and the real dynamics of security transformation.
A must-have for anyone interested in learning how a comprehensive, integrated approach to cybersecurity can help organizations overcome legacy and current risks and build a robust, adaptive defense against cyber threats in the corporate world
The author (JC Gaillard) has been involved with information security matters for over 20 years and started writing regularly on the topic in 2015.
Talking to CISOs, CIO, CEOs and their teams as part of his day-to-day field work as consultant, he became gradually horrified by what he was seeing in too many large corporates in terms of security maturity levels and the actual problems some were still struggling with - something that goes way beyond anecdotal evidence and is at the heart of survey after survey every year.
After all, information security good practices have been well established for over 20 years and many industry bodies have been promoting them and evolving them throughout that period.
Why is it that large firms which have had fully functioning information security teams in place all that time, and have spent - collectively - hundreds of millions on the topic if not more on cyber security, are still struggling today with issues - such as patch management - which should have been on their radar for over 10 years?
There is truly a cyber security lost decade for many between the CodeRed, Slammer and Blaster outbreaks of 2001-2003 and the Wannacry and Not Petya attacks of 2017.
By failing to get the basics right in terms of security during that time, while continuing to engage in massive cloud-driven business transformation programmes that have turned the enterprise into a truly borderless hybrid, many large firms have dramatically increased their level of exposure to cyber threats. And now the acceleration of the digital transformation emboldened by the COVID crisis and its aftermath, and the emergence of disruptive artificial intelligence products, is making things even more complex.
Politicians and regulators are now involved as the GDPR and other similar legislations across the world have shown us over the past few years, now with an even increased regulatory burden building up across the United States and worldwide.
At Board level, the "when-not-if" paradigm around cyber-attacks has taken root, but it creates fundamentally different dynamics for CISOs and CIOs, as the focus shifts radically from risk and compliance towards execution and delivery, often in exchange of massive investments around security.
To embed those different dynamics around cyber security and make true progress, large organisations must stop thinking of the topic in pure technological terms, look back and address urgently the underlying cultural and governance issues that have been the true roadblocks of that "lost decade".
This is the theme the author has been developing since 2015 through his contribution to the Corix Partners blog and the second edition of this "Handbook" offers a selection of over 100 articles published between 2015 and 2024.
They frame a true reflexion on those matters and offer elements of solution to start changing the narrative around cyber security.