KEYNOTE: Lessons from failure: How cyber security professionals can learn from analytic mistakes in other fields

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Presented at WebSecuritySummit 2020 by

George Beebe

One of the most difficult challenges that cyber security professionals face is to anticipate and counter attacks by adversaries. The implications of failure are often enormous. But the odds against success are stacked by the inherent uncertainties in any complex system, the unpredictability of human behaviour, and the cognitive biases to which all analysts are prone, regardless of their area of expertise. Nonetheless, there is good news: Cyber specialists can learn lessons from past failures that increase their odds of success. In this eye-opening interactive talk, former CIA senior executive George Beebe shows how to apply those lessons in practical ways:The process of becoming an expert in a field also makes experts less able to anticipate disruptions to the normal course of events.To reduce their risks of surprise, cyber security professionals should learn lessons from mistakes made by experts in other fields.These lessons include:Seeking alternative explanations for emerging developments;Looking to disconfirm rather than to support plausible analytic hypotheses; andAttempting to see things through the eyes of potential adversaries.