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.

1. 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.
2. 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issues and over 2,000 known vulnerabilities segmented into 23 unique risk factors such as malware, vulnerabilities, and outdated systems.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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Bitsight: The World’s Leading Security Ratings Service

Bitsight delivers security ratings that measure security performance of some of the world’s largest organizations and governments, and their third-party ecosystem. Bitsight’s leading cybersecurity reporting service delivers actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks through continuous monitoring of large collections of objective and independently verified data.

Bitsight was recently named a Leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Cybersecurity Risk Rating Solutions, Q1 2021. As the creator and largest vendor by market presence in the category, we were honored to be recognized and to be the only vendor recognized for having a differentiated product roadmap and go-to market strategy.

Solutions To Answer Every Cybersecurity Question

Bitsight’s offerings include:

• Bitsight Security Ratings. Bitsight ratings are a measurement of organization’s security performance generated through the analysis of externally observable data. Bitsight continuously measures performance based on evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the rating, the more effective the company’s adherence to cybersecurity best practices and the lower the risk of breach.
• Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Bitsight enables security and risk leaders to measure the performance of their programs and align investments and actions to achieve the highest measurable impact over time. Through broad measurement, continuous cyber risk monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, security leaders can achieve continuous visibility into their expanding digital footprint, identify gaps in security programs, and ensure that investments in security controls are efficient and effective.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management. Bitsight provides automated tools that continuously measure and monitor the security performance of vendors. By immediately exposing cyber risk within the supply chain, Bitsight helps security leaders to focus their resources, ask the right cybersecurity questions to work with vendors to achieve significant and measurable cyber risk reduction.
• Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. Bitsight helps security teams uncover the risk hidden across digital assets in the cloud, subsidiaries, geographies, and remote workforces. By providing visibility into digital assets and the associated risks, security teams can prioritize high-risk assets and remediation.

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 Are The Most Important Cybersecurity Questions?