August 2026 Webinar: The Woozle effect: how unsourced numbers sink good risk analysis | Tony Martin-Vegue

Speaker: Tony Martin-Vegue

Admission: Free

Abstract: 

What do Winnie the Pooh and some of the most-quoted statistics in cybersecurity have in common? Both involve a strange case of evidence by repetition.

We use other people's numbers every day. They set our base rates, justify our budgets, open our board decks, and get copied into somebody else's report. The whole arrangement runs on trust, since almost nobody has time to check where a figure came from before repeating it. Our data should have to earn that trust. Numbers you'd recognize trace back to a projection about something else, a press release, or nothing at all, and once a figure has been repeated enough times it stops looking like it needs checking.

This session is about closing that gap. We'll look at how bad numbers get into circulation, then work through how to trace a figure back to its source and how to judge the source once you've found it. Speed is the new factor. AI-assisted analysis will happily carry an unsourced number straight into your model in a matter of seconds.

Speaker Bio: 

Tony Martin-Vegue is the founder of 95 Risk Advisory, a cybersecurity risk quantification consultancy, and the author of From Heatmaps to Histograms: A Practical Guide to Cyber Risk Quantification (Apress, 2026), a book focused on helping practitioners bring quantitative rigor to cyber risk management with accessible methods and sound data. He is also co-founder of CRQ Bootcamp, a tiered training program running from free introductory courses through advanced intensives on model risk and program leadership. Drawing on more than 25 years in information security and deep roots in decision science and measurement theory, he has built quantitative risk programs for Fortune 500 companies and advises executives and boards on making better security decisions under uncertainty. He is an Executive Fellow at the Cyentia Institute and a FAIR Ambassador Award recipient.

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