Approaches to Risk Analysis

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When planning any kind of project, especially an information security project, risk analysis is very important. Risk analysis, in the context of information security, is the process of assessing potential threats to an organization and the overall risk they pose to the continued operation of the organization. There are multiple approaches to risk analysis, and multitudes of literature have been published on the subject.
In their paper published in 2012, Bhattacharjee and associates introduced two approaches to the risk assessment of an information security system. Bhattacharjee and associates’ method is a two-stage method, with a consolidated analysis, identifying a single risk value for each asset, and a detailed analysis, which defines a threat-vulnerability pair for each risk factor (Bhattacharjee, Sengupta, Mazumdar, & Sankar Barik, 2012).
The method first identifies assets and defines seven requirements factors for each: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, non-repudiation, legal, and impact of loss. Each of these factors is assigned a sliding scale value based upon the intensity of the specific requirement (Bhattacharjee, Sengupta, Mazumdar, & Sankar Barik, 2012). Once all assets have been given their requirements values, the overall asset value is defined. This value is combined with the security concern value, “a function of threats and vulnerabilities associated with an asset” (Bhattacharjee, Sengupta, Mazumdar, & Sankar Barik, 2012). to assign an overall risk factor value to the asset.
Once the consolidated step is completed a detailed risk analysis is performed. This analysis begins by identifying security requirements that have been assigned a value of greater than two. Threats and vulnerabilities ...

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...nternational Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies (pp. 393-398). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
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Schneider, R. M. (2010). A comparison of information security risk analysis in the context of e-government to criminological threat assessment techniques. 2010 Information Security Curriculum Development Conference (pp. 107-116). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
Sulaman, S. M., Weyns, K., & Höst, M. (2013). A review of research on risk analysis methods for IT systems. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (pp. 86-96). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

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