Presented at the SERENE-RISC Workshop October 2017.
Joseph Mudge
Co-operators General Insurance Company
Collaboration toward a knowledge engineering model for cyber risk assessment
Collaboration among cyber risk experts is important for a robust Canadian cybersecurity posture. Although data sharing agreements are an important way that organizations can collaborate toward improving cybersecurity, there are sometimes barriers to sharing cyber risk data that can be difficult to overcome. The sharing of insights and opinions among cybersecurity experts can also be valuable, and can often be shared more freely than data. If properly integrated, the aggregated opinions of cybersecurity experts should be able to provide actionable insights comparable to some of the output of data sharing agreements, and possibly also additional insights that could not be derived from data. Currently, cybersecurity expertise is shared using unstandardized and imprecise terminology, communication that is often one-way (i.e. reports), and with little clarity or consistency in the goals of shared expertise. These factors make it difficult to aggregate expert opinions in a reliable and meaningful way. At The Co-operators, I’m working toward building a knowledge engineering framework that can focus the collaboration of Canadian cybersecurity experts into a simple AI tool for evaluating organizational cyber risks. This expert-judgement-based cyber risk evaluation model will perform best by incorporating a high diversity of cybersecurity expertise, so I’m seeking many interested collaborators.
About the speaker
Dr. Mudge has been working as a data scientist in the Business Intelligence department of The Co-operators General Insurance Company since 2015. He primarily conducts research related to the commercial insurance products offered by The Sovereign General Insurance Company (a subsidiary of The Co-operators Group), especially for their commercial cyber insurance program. Dr. Mudge has developed techniques for modelling the annual expected losses due to cyber events across a cyber insurance book of business. Cyber insurance product development is a strong priority for The Co-operators Group and methods for quantifying cybersecurity risks faced by cyber insurance clients using externally available information remains a key research focus for Dr. Mudge in 2018. Dr. Mudge has a PhD in Environmetrics and brings ecological systems and environmental risk assessment perspectives to his cybersecurity research. He is also an active supporter of the ‘Open’ movement, and is seeking to encourage open data, open source, and open innovation principles in the Canadian cybersecurity sector.
Running time: Approximately 27 Minutes
