Cybersecurity Likelihood Of Attack

Determining The Likelihood Of A Cybersecurity Attack

As cybersecurity threats proliferate, it’s no longer feasible prevent every security breach. Instead, many organizations are building cyber resilience to respond quickly when a breach occurs. However, there are many opportunities to minimize the opportunities for cyber criminals to penetrate security defenses.

In cybersecurity, likelihood of attack can be determined by continuously monitoring your security programs, policies, and controls for effectiveness against an evolving threat landscape. But performing this manually consumes considerable IT resources.

BitSight Security Ratings offers an easy, intuitive way to understand the likelihood of a cybersecurity attack. Providing data-driven insight into the security performance of your business and your third-party ecosystem, BitSight Ratings reveal your propensity for risk and likelihood of attack—and what steps you should take to avoid a breach.

BitSight Security Ratings

BitSight Security Ratings work like a credit score. Ranging in value from 250 to 900, higher ratings indicate stronger cybersecurity performance, while lower ratings indicate a greater likelihood of a cybersecurity attack.

Rather than relying on traditional evaluation techniques like penetration testing, internal audits, questionnaires, or on-site visits, BitSight Security Ratings leverage externally observable data from sources around the world, mapping this information to individual organizations. BitSight is the only security ratings provider with proven outside validation that its Security Ratings correlate with data breaches, ransomware, and business financial performance.

BitSight Ratings are based on data drawn from more than 100 sources covering 23 risk vectors in four critical areas of cybersecurity: evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches that have been publicly disclosed. By processing over 250 billion events daily, BitSight Ratings provide a powerful tool for continuously monitoring security performance and determining the likelihood of a cybersecurity attack.

Monitoring Likelihood Of A Cybersecurity Attack

BitSight offers solutions to continuously monitor your own cybersecurity performance as well as the likelihood of attack in your third-party network.

BitSight Security Performance Management

Leveraging BitSight Security Ratings, BitSight for Security Performance Management (SPM) provides tools for continuous controls monitoring to measure the effectiveness of your cybersecurity performance across multiple business units. Security teams use BitSight to exercise sound program governance over the expanded digital footprint and deliver evidence-based assurance to all stakeholders to build confidence in your security programs. BitSight SPM provides quick and on-demand cyber risk quantification metrics about your exposure in financial terms and helps to prioritize work and investments to improve security performance.

BitSight for Third-Party Risk Management

To improve visibility into the security of your supply chain, BitSight for Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) makes it easy to measure and continuously monitor security performance of each vendor, validating controls for both new and existing vendors. Security teams onboard and assess new vendors quickly and reduce the burden of managing third-party risk with automated tools. To improve IT vendor risk management, teams leverage continuous monitoring to track changes, prioritize responses, and optimize efforts as you drive more effective risk reduction.

Reducing Likelihood Of A Ransomware Attack

As ransomware attacks continue to grow in frequency and severity, many organizations are seeking strategies to enhance cybersecurity defenses and reduce the likelihood of attack. BitSight’s research team analyzed hundreds of ransomware events to estimate the relative probability that an organization would experience a ransomware attack. This research uncovered three critical steps organizations must take to reduce likelihood of attack.

• Improve patching cadence. Businesses that patch vulnerabilities within one week have the highest security performance. Poor patching performance correlates to a nearly sevenfold increase in ransomware risks.
• Identify security hygiene gaps. Organizations that have gaps in governance, operations, management, and other fundamental IT security practices are more likely to experience a breach.
• Remediating vulnerabilities in widely deployed technology. While ransomware was originally delivered through phishing attacks, recent attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities in widely deployed technology such as Fortinet, Citrix, and Pulse Secure.

Why Choose BitSight?

Founded in 2011, BitSight is the world’s leading security rating service, transforming how companies approach security performance management and third-party risk management. BitSight provides security ratings for 120 governmental institutions, 20% of the Fortune 1000 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.

BitSight’s platform provides:

• A highly robust community of cyber risk interactions across 170,000 actively monitored organizations.
• Deep visibility into key areas of cyber risk that are correlated to breach, including compromised systems, filesharing, open ports, and mobile and desktop software.
• Visual tools to help prioritize efforts and promote collaboration internally and externally with vendors to address the most significant areas of cyber risk.