We outline possible approaches to cybersecurity governance and compare them against the proposed European Union network of competence centers. We survey stakeholders for their opinions about the centers and analyze the results.@en

[Context] The CVSS framework provides several dimensions to score vulnerabilities. The environmental metrics allow security analysts to downgrade or upgrade vulnerability scores based on a company’s computing environments and security requirements. [Question] How difficult is for a human assessor to change the CVSS environmental score due to changes in security requirements (let alone technical configurations) for PCI-DSS compliance for networks and systems vulnerabilities of different type? [Results] A controlled experiment with 29 MSc students shows that given a segmented network it is significantly more difficult to apply the CVSS scoring guidelines on security requirements with respect to a flat network layout, both before and after the network has been changed to meet the PCI-DSS security requirements. The network configuration also impact the correctness of vulnerabilities assessment at system level but not at application level. [Contribution] This paper is the first attempt to empirically investigate the guidelines for the CVSS environmental metrics. We discuss theoretical and practical key aspects needed to move forward vulnerability assessments for large scale systems.@en

Security risk assessment methods in industry mostly use a tabular notation to represent the assessment results whilst academic works advocate graphical methods. Experiments with MSc students showed that the tabular notation is better than an iconic graphical notation for the comprehension of security risks. [Aim] We investigate whether the availability of textual labels and terse UML-style notation could improve comprehensibility. [Method] We report the results of an online comprehensibility experiment involving 61 professionals with an average of 9 years of working experience, in which we compared the ability to comprehend security risk assessments represented in tabular, UML-style with textual labels, and iconic graphical modeling notations. [Results] Tabular notation are still the most comprehensible notion in both recall and precision. However, the presence of textual labels does improve the precision and recall of participants over iconic graphical models. [Conclusion] Tabular representation better supports extraction of correct information of both simple and complex comprehensibility questions about security risks than the graphical notation but textual labels help.@en