Betsy Nichols was invited to be the featured speaker at the CISO Summit Boston on 29 November 2011.  Betsy delivered a presentation entitled "Risk Management:  What Succeeds and What Fails".  The presentation covered practical and proven techniques for modeling and measuring risk along with "war stories" and lessons learned.  More information can be found here.

Security Metrics:  A Beginners Guide is now available.  You can learn more about it here.  Betsy Nichols contributed three chapters that cover analytics, functional requirements for a metrics platform, and technologies that can be used to implement a metrics management system.

Metricon 5.5 was held again on Valentine's day this year in conjunction with the RSA 2011 Conference in San Francisco, CA.  Betsy Nichols of PlexLogic served on the Program Committee along with several others including Jennifer Bayuk, Program Chair and 14 others.  Speakers included Chris Eng, Alex Hutton, Wade Baker, Chris Walsh, John Nye, Juhani Eronen, Proshinger Fruhwirth, Alfonso Gregorio, Greg Shannon, Matthew Finifter, Jared Pfost, Miles McQueen, Jennifer Bayuk, and Davi Ottenheimer.  A new format with 5 minute "lightening talks" added excitement to the one-day workshop.  Copies of most presentations and a digest can be found a www.securitymetrics.org.

Betsy Nichols will contribute two chapters to an upcoming book to be authored by Carolyn Wong and published by McGraw-Hill.  The working title of the book Security Metrics: A Beginner’s Guide.  It is intended to be a must-have for any networking or security practitioner looking to optimize an existing security program and demonstrate measurable results. It presents real life scenarios with limited resources and provides straight forward guidance for getting started quickly.

Dan Crisp, Barclays Bank and Betsy Nichols will present at the Cloud Security Alliance 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida, Nov 16-17, 2010.  The talk will cover measuring data privacy in the cloud with particular focus on using metrics as hard evidence of compliance and to drive improvement.  You can find out more about CSA here and about the Congress here.

The Metricon 5 Workshop will be held on Tuesday, Aug 10, 2010.  Metricon is a forum for presenting new approaches for measuring information security effectiveness, with a bias towards practical, specific approaches. Topics and presentations will be selected for their novelty and merit, and their potential to stimulate discussion. With five years of organized conferences in the history books, this year's theme, appropriately, is Older But Wiser.

Program Co-Chairs:

• Andrew Jaquith, Forrester Research
• Khalid Kark, Forrester Research

Program committee members:

• Jennifer Bayuk, Stevens Institute of Technology
• Dan Geer, In-Q-Tel
• Chris Walsh, SurePayroll
• Wade Baker, Verizon Risk Intelligence
• Ray Kaplan, Ray Kaplan & Associates
• Michael Smith, Akamai Technologies
• Daniel Arista, Syracuse Research Corporation

You can find out more at www.securitymetrics.org.