Cybersecurity Questions For Your Ratings Provider
Choosing a security ratings service provider is one of the most important decisions you’ll make around cybersecurity. You’ll rely on your provider for critical visibility into your security performance as well as risk in your supply chain, so there’s a lot riding on the accuracy of your ratings. This means you’ll want to ask some pretty tough cybersecurity questions of your potential security ratings partners.
Bitsight is up for the challenge. Our company was founded in 2011 to transform how organizations evaluate risk and security performance. Using the same outside-in model developed by the credit ratings industry, Bitsight enables security leaders to get answers to a wide range of cybersecurity questions as they seek to measure security performance and evaluate third-party risk.
The 4 Key Cybersecurity Questions
When choosing a security ratings partner, there are several critical cybersecurity questions to ask of your potential security ratings partner. Here are the four most important questions – and how Bitsight answers them.
Data breach response plans are highly customized to the needs of each organization, but there are several tasks that must be included in this kind of cyber security plan for every business.
- Is the rating independently verified to accurately reflect risk? The most important characteristic of any security rating is whether it has been verified to accurately reflect a company’s risk of cyber breach. Bitsight is the only provider that offers security ratings that have been statistically validated by a third party. Bitsight’s ratings are proven to correlate to real-life cyber-risk exposure and events. Verified by AIR Worldwide research, we’ve demonstrated that organizations with stronger Bitsight ratings are less likely to experience a breach.
- What data is included in the rating and how accurate is it? Superior security ratings will consider the broadest amount of data sources to deliver the most accurate picture. When developing ratings, Bitsight uses a four-part process to drive accuracy. We automate data collection using over 100 data providers to observe 260 billion external observable events with insight into critical issues across 300 million companies. We catalogue from 500+ known cybersecurity issues and over 2,000 known vulnerabilities segmented into 23 unique risk factors such as malware, vulnerabilities, and outdated systems. We rely on human review to continually tune our automated processes. And we allow organizations to add data and context to their ratings based on their own internal knowledge.
- How transparent is the ratings algorithm and the dispute resolution process? Trust and transparency are critical to the security ratings process. While Bitsight’s rating and dispute resolution process is rigorous, rated entities are able to challenge their rating and our methodology. We seek accurate, prompt remediation of disputes by evaluating data submitted from impacted organizations and helping them understand our conclusions while creating an audit trail of supporting evidence. Focusing on transparency and empiricism, Bitsight’s dispute resolution process is unique among security rating service providers.
- How will a ratings provider fit into my ecosystem and how will it continue to evolve? Customers want to know that their security ratings provider will be a partner long into the future. Bitsight has proven to be a trusted partner and is the only vendor offering a full suite of capabilities for first-party use cases – our competitors offer some functionality, but do so via their third-party offering. Bitsight has demonstrated an ability to help answer the toughest cybersecurity questions and solve the most difficult challenges facing security teams, and we’re committed to being a strong partner now and for the future.
