Cyber Risk Assessment

What is a cyber risk assessment?

A cyber risk assessment is an evaluation of the information assets within an IT environment that might be affected by a cyberattack. These may include data, intellectual property, devices, systems, and hardware. The assessment also analyzes the risk associated with each asset.

Benefits of a risk assessment

By conducting regular cyber risk assessments, security teams can better understand and prioritize the assets that need to be protected based on the severity of risk associated with each. This enables teams to direct optimal resources toward the most severe risks, improving the organization’s security performance and posture.

What's the purpose of a cyber risk assessment?

Identifying & Visualizing risk

As data breaches continue to wreak havoc and grab headlines, organizations are looking for more effective ways to identify and mitigate cyber risk and cyber liability. Traditional cyber risk assessments are time-consuming and limited in the information they provide, providing only a point-in-time snapshot of security performance. To keep pace with the rapid evolution of cybersecurity threats, organizations must be able to assess their security posture on a continuous basis, identifying and detecting unknown risk hiding in their digital ecosystems.

The challenges of assessing cyber risk

Digital ecosystems today are constantly expanding, creating new obstacles for security teams as they conduct cyber risk assessments and work to maintain a strong security posture.

1. Incomplete visibility

It’s harder than ever today to get a clear view of risk. Cloud infrastructure, mergers and acquisitions, and geographically dispersed business units make the corporate digital footprint more complex and dynamic. Not to mention an onslaught of connectivity from work from home devices combined with increasing reliance on third parties to perform necessary business operations complicating your network even more. It’s difficult for many organizations to simply create an inventory of critical assets, let alone assess the risks that are associated with them.

2. Lack of context

To maximize the impact of available resources and get the greatest return on investment (ROI) for security initiatives, organizations must allocate resources based on the severity of risk associated with each asset. Without the right tools, however, security teams rarely have the context they need to identify the most critical risks or potentially severe security events. As a result, prioritizing remediation efforts relies on guesswork more than data-driven decisions.

3. No common language

Disparate systems and teams within an organization typically lack a common language for discussing cybersecurity, KPIs, vulnerabilities, and issues. Without a standard set of KPIs, organizations find it difficult to implement cyber risk best practices, measure performance, track improvement, and determine whether resources are being used effectively.

To overcome these challenges, organizations need continuous visibility into assets and the risk they may be hiding. That’s where Bitsight can help. Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight delivers much-needed visibility into an organization’s overall security posture as well as liabilities and risk in its attack surface. With Bitsight tools for cyber risk assessment, security teams and risk managers can make faster, more strategic decisions about remediation and how to focus resources for optimal impact.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, part of the Bitsight Security Performance Management suite of solutions, helps security teams to validate a digital footprint, conduct a cyber risk assessment, and identify how to quickly remediate vulnerabilities. By providing additional context around the organization’s security rating, this Bitsight solution makes it easier to pinpoint specific risks decide where to focus cybersecurity efforts.

Visualize digital assets

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics provides unprecedented insight into digital assets across all ecosystem endpoints. Bitsight automatically discovers assets, identifying location and prioritizing associated risks for quick remediation.

Uncover shadow IT

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics helps security teams discover unknown assets known as shadow IT – technology solutions that are procured or spun up by functional teams and individuals without IT’s knowledge or standard vetting. Bitsight helps identify any associated cyber risks and enforces appropriate security policies to bring shadow IT in line.

Monitor hidden risk

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics gives security teams continuous, broad visibility and context into the attack surface in the cloud across all hosting providers. By shining a spotlight on the security of cloud-hosted assets, Bitsight helps reveal unknown vulnerabilities, infections, and misconfiguration that could lead to a breach.

Why choose Bitsight?

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains.

Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.