It is October tenth, 2024, and I’ve simply stepped out of KB4-CON EMEA, my head buzzing with insights and my pocket book crammed with scribbles.
I stroll down the acquainted streets round Liverpool Road station, I can not assist however really feel a way of nostalgia – that is the place my profession in cybersecurity started, in spite of everything.
The convention was a whirlwind of brilliance, even with our CEO, Stu Sjouwerman, becoming a member of us nearly. From Tony Pepper’s visionary keynote on human threat administration to Greg Kras’s roadmap reveal and Martin Kraemer’s AI deep dive, it was a real cybersecurity masterclass.
But it surely was Geoff White, creator and journalist extraordinaire, who actually obtained my gears turning. He shared an anecdote in regards to the Grenfell Tower tragedy that struck a chord. The media, he defined, struggled to cowl the potential hearth threat earlier than the catastrophe as a result of, effectively, how do you visually symbolize a threat that hasn’t occurred but? “You possibly can’t simply level the digicam at a constructing and say there is a threat of a hearth,” he mentioned.
And it dawned on me that that is the problem cybersecurity professionals face each single day.
Give it some thought. We’re always making an attempt to persuade individuals of invisible threats. In all probability sounding like Hen Little saying the sky is falling. Positive, we are able to level to the info, the patterns, the potential for catastrophe, however with out one thing tangible to point out, it typically appears like we’re shouting into the void.
So, what’s a cybersecurity professional to do? How can we make the invisible seen? How can we paint an image of threat that is so vivid, so compelling, that folks can not help however take discover?
The reply, I consider, lies in storytelling. We have to change into the administrators of our personal cybersecurity scripts. As a substitute of dry stories and technical jargon, we have to craft narratives that convey these dangers to life. We have to flip knowledge into characters, threats into plot twists, and safety measures into heroic actions. Effectively, perhaps not actually that, however you get the thought.Â
After all, we will not depend on Hollywood magic alone. We want instruments that may assist us translate advanced knowledge into compelling narratives. That is the place instruments like SmartRisk Agent and Threat Rating v2 are available. They are not nearly crunching numbers – they’re about giving us the uncooked materials for our tales. They assist us establish the characters (high-risk customers), set the scene (your group’s distinctive threat panorama), and plot the narrative arc (how dangers evolve over time).
The following time you are struggling to convey the significance of a safety measure or the urgency of a possible risk, ask your self: “The place do I level the digicam?” What is the story you are making an attempt to inform? How are you going to make the invisible seen?