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Cybersecurity Threat Brainstorming in Twigflo

Frank Font

Many organizations have the complex obligation of assessing and mitigating their cyber risk exposures. For some organizations this is a regulatory mandate; for others, it is simply a business necessity.

Effective threat identification and mitigation can be a daunting endeavor even with the right resourcing. Many people with different areas of specialization may need to collaborate. Rapid high-quality progress can provide an organization-level innovation and competitive edge.

Brainstorming in the Twigflo process can deliver this edge.

Threat Brainstorming: The simple Twigflo process

The general Twigflo brainstorming process can be described as follows.

For a threat assessment and mitigation brainstorming session there are any number of modeling preferences that can come into play. The modeling details will vary with an organization’s asset inventory profile and a facilitator’s skill at tapping into the flow of a productive focused conversation. Here are a few examples.

Example 1: Focus the mission on identifying all assets to harden

This is a fundamental step for any organization. A periodic brainstorming to reassess the relevant asset inventory can ensure there are no blindspots.

The categories of assets are not as important as having a comprehensive identification of all the assets that are of value or may present surfaces for cyber-compromise. Clever categorization can be a catalyst for triggering group insights. Twigflo makes it simple to create ad-hoc categorizations and identify assets as the conversation brings them up.

Example 2: Focus the mission on hardening one resource

Create a mission where you identify hardening one resource of your system. In the example shown below, we see some brainstorming insights for hardening a database.

During the session, or any time after, participants can voice areas of concern and collectively agree on how that concern translates into a surface or a vector that needs to be assessed.

Clear Focused Insights

Anyone joining a meeting in progress can at a glance see what topics have been identified so far and is easily able to jump in with context relevant insights and questions to further the collective insight of the group.

Twigflo mission diagrams do not require a deep domain knowledge or careful study before participants are able to pop-up context relevant questions for clarification and illumination. The single-purpose directed nature of each diagram keeps the context small and manageable by design.

Money, Effort, and Probabilities

Each item in a Twigflo diagram can have a monetary value associated with it, and also an effort insight. 

Rollup math is automatic to spark conversations on cost of risk exposure and mitigation.

Items can also be associated with probabilities to illuminate particularly risky threat areas to specifically bring attention where attention needs to be.

Templates

Teams can easily create templates to re-use as starting points for new brainstorming missions. Twigflo also has some publicly shared templates and that inventory is also growing.

Cybersecurity Insights Shared Throughout the Team

The insight artifacts created in Twigflo can be shared with your team to provide immediately clear risk assumptions and insights on mitigation. 

The simple concept-leveling nature of mission diagrams enables all organization stakeholders to understand the captured insights where domain-specialized concepts and language may have impeded communication before.

Contact us atfeedback@twigflo.com for more information or to schedule a demo; or create a free account now and explore what Twigflo.com can do for you in this area and others.