Sleeping soundly despite concerns about your 'pseudo security' measures?
In today's digital landscape, it's crucial for organisations to avoid placebo security - measures that create a false sense of protection without effectively mitigating risks. To achieve this, a thorough, risk-based assessment is essential.
The key steps to identifying and avoiding placebo security include:
- Evaluating effectiveness against actual risks: Scrutinise security measures for their protective value, rather than relying on compliance checkboxes or superficial controls that do not increase adversary cost or reduce the likelihood of breaches.
- Conducting tailored risk assessments: Use dynamic and comprehensive risk management frameworks that take into account your organisation’s assets, threat actors, and operational context, rather than one-size-fits-all security solutions.
- Avoiding overreliance on easy-to-implement measures with low strategic security impact: For instance, cosmetic controls that simply convey a feeling of safety without materially increasing attacker's cost or reducing exposure.
- Employing protocols that raise adversary cost disproportionately while minimising defender effort: Recent research proposes such protocols, making authenticating information and verifying security claims efficient for defenders but computationally expensive for adversaries, effectively increasing security guarantees.
- Continuously validating and verifying security measures: Implement spot-checking, penetration testing, and verification protocols designed to require minimal effort to verify authenticity but significantly increase adversary workload, ensuring measures are doing real defensive work.
- Aligning risk management practices with holistic and proactive frameworks: Integrate ongoing risk evaluation into your security lifecycle, inspired by regulatory approaches like the European Medicines Agency’s Risk Management Plan, which embeds continuous, comprehensive risk identification and mitigation from the outset.
- Leveraging contextual intelligence and automation tools: AI and risk intelligence platforms can help prioritise and manage threats more effectively, reducing blind spots and avoiding misplaced confidence in inadequate controls.
Remember, basic and complex physical and technical security solutions should be based on the client’s actual requirements, not recycled solutions. Near real-time intelligence on the client’s environment is essential for effective security measures. Security professionals should understand the most sensitive areas to protect and engage in a two-way discussion with the client.
Consultants and salespeople should stay informed about current threat landscapes to tailor security measures to address specific vulnerabilities and challenges. Asking targeted questions of security professionals helps focus on specific threats and vulnerabilities. The relationship between a security consultant and their client is analogous to a medical professional and a patient, with the consultant providing assurance that their estate, corporate premises, information, or artifacts are safe from harm.
Placebo security is not intentionally sold for profit, but it can occur due to a lack of understanding of varied and bespoke threat vectors. Clients have a major role to play in preventing the integration of placebo security measures in their regime. Intelligence-led security solutions proactively identify and mitigate unique risks to the client. Therefore, clients should opt for a bespoke intelligence-led security solution for personalised protection. A tailored approach to security measures enables better threat prevention and detection, ensuring that people, information, facilities, or assets are kept safe when needed. Old security solutions should not be used as a one-size-fits-all approach. Placebo security refers to measures that are implemented to give the appearance of security based on limited understanding of the actual threats faced by the client.
- Organisations should evaluate their technology solutions not only based on compliance but also their effectiveness in addressing specific risks, as reliance on measures that do not increase adversary cost or reduce the likelihood of breaches can lead to placebo security.
- To prevent the integration of placebo security measures, clients should opt for bespoke intelligence-led security solutions that proactively identify and mitigate unique risks, rather than relying on outdated or generic solutions.
