Cyber resilience vs. cybersecurity

In recent years, organizations around the globe have been understandably focused on cybersecurity. Threats continue to grow in severity, and cyber criminals are capable of launching devastating, more sophisticated attacks on even the most vigilant companies. The size of the average organizational attack surface has grown as well, thanks to digital transformation and ever-larger vendor footprints. To survive in this new era, companies must evolve their focus on cybersecurity to a commitment to cyber resilience.

Being resilient in the face of cyber threats requires comprehensive security programs and continual efforts to mitigate risk. Bitsight can help – with solutions for continuously monitoring security performance, measuring security controls, mitigating supply chain risk, and quantifying cyber risk for business leaders.

How to build cyber resilience

Cyber resilience requires an adaptive approach to security that helps security organizations quickly adapt to the latest threats without impacting business performance. In contrast to traditional security programs that focus on remediating issues, adaptive security achieves cyber resilience through continuous monitoring and reducing risk at the root cause. By quickly uncovering anomalies, malicious traffic, and vulnerabilities in the attack surface, security teams can block potential risks from becoming detrimental through root-cause analysis and predictive analytics.

To maintain cyber resilience through adaptive security, organizations should focus on four key tasks:

Evaluate security performance 24/7

Rather than scheduling periodic cybersecurity audits, organizations can proactively manage risk by continuously monitoring IT infrastructure for vulnerabilities, such as unpatched systems, open ports, misconfigured software, and malware infections.

Continuously assess security controls

Monitoring the effectiveness of security controls can help organizations avoid the “whack-a-mole” syndrome where new issues pop up as soon as old ones are fixed. By continuously assessing the effectiveness of every security control even when imminent risks aren’t present, risk managers can better understand root causes and prevent issues in the first place. For this, your team can start with some basic cyber resilience metrics like response speed.

Monitor supply chain risk

As supply chains become more interconnected, third-party risk has become a leading cause of data breaches. Traditional risk assessment tools like vendor security risk assessment questionnaires only provide a point-in-time view of supply chain risk. To achieve cyber resilience, organizations should continuously monitor the security performance of their entire third-party portfolio, looking for concerning levels of risk in the security posture of vendors.

Quantify cyber risk

Too often, cyber risk is seen by business leaders as a technology problem with no clear impact on the business. To engage executives and board members in productive discussions about cyber risk priorities and cyber resilience, organizations need tools to financially quantify the impact of risk, enabling leaders to make better decisions about security program resources and investments.

Building cyber resilience with Bitsight

Bitsight provides trusted data and insights that enable organizations to make better risk-based decisions. The Bitsight platform offers a suite of solutions that can help organizations achieve cyber resilience and reduce the impact of cyber risk.

Bitsight solutions are based on Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings, a tool that organizations can use to proactively reduce risk throughout their attack surface. Providing an outside-in view of the security posture of organizations and their third-party portfolio, Bitsight Security Ratings take the guesswork out of measuring security performance.

Bitsight ratings range in value from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the rating, the stronger an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Ratings are based on objective, externally verifiable data points covering four areas of cyber risk: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed data breaches. By analyzing and weighting 100 billion new events each day, Bitsight produces daily security ratings for 40 million+ organizations worldwide.

Elements of the Bitsight platform

Fueled by daily security ratings, Bitsight solutions provide the insight organizations need to monitor security performance and achieve cyber resilience.

Bitsight for Security Performance Management

This Bitsight solution provides tools to continuously assess cybersecurity programs. Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables evidence-based cyber risk monitoring, continuous measuring of security control effectiveness, remediation of gaps and vulnerabilities, and effective assurance to drive confidence across the business.

Bitsight Control Insights

Part of Bitsight SPM, Control Insights enables continuous controls monitoring through a best practice framework to measure how effective an organization’s security controls are. Control Insights also suggests how to remediate gaps in controls and enables a proactive approach to cyber resilience.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

This Bitsight solution helps reduce risk across the supply chain by enabling organizations to continually measure and monitor third-party and forth-party security controls. Bitsight for Third Party Risk Management increases confidence in supply chain security by validating vendor assessments throughout the entire lifecycle, continuously monitoring vendors’ security posture, and delivering effective assurance that third-party security controls are being managed effectively.

Bitsight Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk

As an add-on module to Bitsight SPM, this cyber risk quantification solution helps CISOs and CIOs to provide business context and data-driven metrics that quantify cyber risk in terms of its cost to the business.

Why 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.

What is Cybersecurity Governance?

Cybersecurity governance is the process of establishing the architecture that ensures a company’s security programs align with business objectives, comply with regulations and standards (such as PCI security standards), and achieve objectives for managing security and risk.

Metrics and Cybersecurity Governance

Cybersecurity governance is a critically important part of managing security and risk in organizations large and small. As a responsibility of boards and executive leaders to enforce, cybersecurity governance ensures that a company’s cybersecurity model and program align with business objectives, complies with government or industry regulations, and achieves the goals that leadership has set out for managing security and risk.

Reporting on cloud security metrics is key to governance. A clear view of the performance of security programs enables boards and executives to make informed decisions about cybersecurity policy and investments, and to know whether the organization’s security objectives and requirements are being met. However, most organizations lack the clear, objective, and actionable metrics they need to support cybersecurity governance. And without a superior reporting structure, the time and cost of preparing reports can tax an already overwhelmed security team.

Bitsight can help. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides organizations with data-driven, objective, and dynamic measurement of their security performance and attack surface – and the security posture of their third-party vendors. By immediately exposing risk within an IT ecosystem and supply chain, Bitsight delivers the information organizations need to govern their security programs more effectively with customizable reports tailored to their organization’s specific needs.

Bitsight Security Ratings Facilitate Governance

Bitsight Security Ratings measure an organization’s security performance. Like credit ratings, Bitsight ratings offer an outside-in approach that evaluates performance with analysis of externally observable data. Armed with daily Bitsight ratings, organizations can proactively quantify and manage risk and improve cybersecurity governance.

Unlike other security assessment tools that rely on periodic scans, Bitsight continuously measures performance based on four categories of data: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Ratings are calculated with a proprietary algorithm, and Bitsight Security Ratings are proven to correlate to likelihood of potential breaches. The higher a company’s rating, the better it is at implementing good security practices and continuous managing new risks to their network.

With Bitsight Security Ratings, security leaders, executives, and boards have the tools to better identify and remediate risk and cybersecurity threats.

Bitsight Solutions for Cybersecurity Governance

Bitsight Security Ratings are the foundation for a suite of solutions that help organizations heighten security performance, mitigate risk, and strengthen cybersecurity governance. These include:

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight helps organizations take a risk-based, outcome-driven approach to managing cybersecurity governance and security programs. Bitsight enables security and risk leaders to measure the performance of security programs and align investments and actions to produce the highest measurable impact. Bitsight makes it easy to allocate resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk while facilitating data-driven, risk-based conversations about cybersecurity governance among key stakeholders.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management. Assessing the security of every vendor has traditionally been a time-consuming task with uneven results. Traditional methods for assessment are resource-intensive and don’t allow for continuous measurement or a proper look into the vendors that will have access to your most sensitive data. With Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, organizations can continuously monitor and quantify the cyber risk of vendors to efficiently scale their third-party risk management programs. Security ratings provide a simple snapshot of each organization’s security posture, allowing risk teams to track a company’s performance over time, collaborate on remediation plans, or set performance standards in contracts.
• Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking. Comparing security performance and posture against peers and competitors is an essential part of cybersecurity governance. Bitsight delivers a continuous, data-driven measure of security performance to provide a quantified baseline and comparative data. With benchmarking tools from Bitsight, organizations can measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to industry peers, and communicate meaningful security program updates to senior leadership using KPI’s they are familiar with.

Bitsight Methodology and Governance Process

When organizations use Bitsight Security Ratings to make critical business decisions, it’s important that the ratings themselves are accurate and trustworthy. Bitsight was founded with the goal of increasing transparency around cybersecurity to enable dynamic, informed interactions between global market participants.

Bitsight’s governance process provides guidelines for responsible development of security ratings. In 2017, Bitsight helped create the “Principles for Fair and Accurate Security Ratings,” a set of practices that affirm the role of ratings in promoting security and govern the responsibility of companies like Bitsight in creating these measurements.

To enable stronger cybersecurity governance based on concrete data, Bitsight is dedicated to ensuring:

• Accuracy. Ratings must be accurate, fair, and trustworthy. When errors occur, there must be a straightforward and consistent process for correcting them.
• Ubiquity. Ratings should be available for nearly every significant organization across all industries, enabling comparison against industry and global benchmarks.
• Stability. Since significant changes in security posture take time, security ratings should be stable and free from rapid fluctuation.
• Comparability. Security ratings must allow meaningful comparison of performance between organizations. Ratings should also be comparable over time, allowing security teams to observe trends.
• Empiricism. Security ratings should be based on objective, verifiable data rather than subjective judgments and opinions. They should also be correlated with the risk of data breaches and predictive of financial performance.
• Transparency. Ratings should be intuitive, consistent, and easy to understand. It should be easy to see how ratings are affected by findings.

Why Bitsight Leads the Security Ratings Market

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.

FAQs: What is Cybersecurity Governance?

How to monitor vendors’ cybersecurity posture

As trends toward outsourcing and remote workforces continue to reshape the business landscape, monitoring the cybersecurity posture of your vendors is more critical than ever. A surprising number of companies, however, rely on annual or biannual surveys to determine third-party cybersecurity posture. In addition to being potentially biased and subjective, these surveys can be outdated within hours of completion. Continuous monitoring is a far more helpful approach but can be challenging to implement without the right tools.

Bitsight offers an answer – an automated, continuous monitoring solution that delivers daily risk and cybersecurity metrics that allow you to proactively identify the cybersecurity posture of vendors to better manage risk throughout your ecosystem.

Evaluating cybersecurity posture

There are four key risk indicators that can help to determine a vendor’s cybersecurity posture.

1. Compromised systems

From botnet infections and spam propagation to malware servers and exploited machines, compromised systems are evidence of successful cyberattacks and an indication of potential future breaches.

2. Diligence

Determining whether a third-party has taken steps to prevent an attack can indicate whether the organization has a strong cyber risk strategy and risk management practices in place.

3. User behavior

User behavior that may expose credentials and employees who use peer-to-peer filesharing protocols may make their organization more susceptible to malware infections.

4. Data breaches

An organization’s history of breaches for which it was at fault is a strong indicator of its cybersecurity posture.

Measuring cybersecurity posture with Bitsight

Bitsight is the world’s most widely adopted Security Ratings solution. Providing a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance, Bitsight enables you to quickly determine a vendor’s cybersecurity posture and to make faster, more strategic management decisions about vendor relationships.

Bitsight Security Ratings are daily ratings derived from objective, verifiable information. Similar to the approach developed by the credit ratings industry, Bitsight Security Ratings are based on the analysis of externally observable data. Bitsight continuously measures the four critical indicators – compromised systems, diligence, user behavior, and data breaches – to deliver a real-time, evidence-based cyber risk assessment.

Benefits of security ratings for cybersecurity posture

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the data and intelligence that drives several use cases.

By generating security ratings that measure the cybersecurity posture of third-party vendors, Bitsight offers significant advantages to your organization.

Easier evaluation

Bitsight Security Ratings help to summarize the risk in vendor relationships and communicate technical details in easily understood terms to make more informed decisions about partnering with other businesses.

Faster onboarding

By enabling you to determine a vendor’s cybersecurity posture and associated risk, Bitsight Security Ratings make it possible to bring vendors on board faster and to take advantage of the services and value they offer.

Reduced risk

By understanding the cyber risk related to each vendor and aligning it with your organization’s risk tolerance levels, you can make data-driven decisions that prioritize resources to reduce risk efficiently across your portfolio.

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.

FAQs: What is Cybersecurity Posture?