ICS Update

The natal announcement for the Index of Cyber Security (ICS) first appeared in these pages one year ago. As we promised at the outset, its first birthday marked the time for a review. The ICS is composed from a survey of expert sentiment-that is to say, it asks a set of respondents what they think. Sentiment-based indices have a long history and wide acceptance; two (US) examples are the Consumer Confidence Index and the Purchasing Managers Index. Generally speaking, sentiment-based indices are vulnerable to misinformed respondents. This is conquered either by large-scale sample randomization (Consumer Confidence) or by careful selection of respondents (Purchasing Managers). The ICS goes with the latter: it gathers a composite of cybersecurity expert opinions that aren´t generalizable to any description of the public at large.