The recent Tripwire blog ‘7 Habits of highly effective Vulnerability Management’ by Tim Erlin was a great read with some sage advice on the always relevant security topic of VM. I noticed, however, that although the seven points themselves were all Tim’s own, the title snappily paraphrased Steven Covey’s classic management book. This made me think.

First published in 1989, Steven Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ is still one of the best and most enduring self-improvement and management books I’ve read. It continues to sell for the simple reason that it ignores trends and instead focuses on the achievement of higher performance through the use of timeless principles of fairness, integrity & honesty. All qualities you would surely seek in today’s professional security services and people.

So, based entirely on Covey’s seven habits, here’s my quick take as to how they can directly translate and relate to cybersecurity:

Be Proactive seven habits1 – Be proactive

A passive, ’box-ticking’ approach to security compliance alone is simply not going to cut it in today’s world of highly dynamic threat and challenge. Every minute spent reactively waiting around for better things to happen for you or doing just enough of what has always been done provides an advantage to your attackers. Instead, we all need to be continually reviewing what is happening around us and proactively making any necessary adjustments and improvements accordingly. Covey’s book talks about concepts of the ‘circle of concern’ and the ‘circle of influence.’ For security professionals, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the sometimes overwhelming ‘circle of concern’ (threats, vulnerabilities, incidents, regulations, negative press, misinformation, blockers, budgetary/resource constraints.) We can all do it. Yet by spending more time in our ‘circle of influence’ (areas we can positively affect and change), Covey suggests we actually (Read more...)