Measuring cybersecurity protection for national critical infrastructure

Cybersecurity attacks on critical national infrastructure are growing at an alarming rate. Successful attacks can be devastating, disrupting financial services, utilities, transportation systems, and other essential infrastructure. To counter these threats, many governments and related agencies are seeking methods to better measure, monitor, and investigate the cybersecurity risks of nation states and their critical infrastructure companies.

Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure is a subscription-based security ratings platform that provides insight into detailed key security performance indicators (Cybersecurity KPIs) to enable organizations to easily assess national security. With Bitsight, national security organizations and computer emergency response teams access the information they need to better understand the threats to critical infrastructure cybersecurity and their country’s security performance.

The challenges to critical infrastructure cybersecurity

As digital transformation has made the world more interconnected, cyberattacks have become some of the most common and dangerous types of threats against national security. Attackers aim to gain access to the networks of governments or their trusted, third-party vendors to unleash devastating attacks on an array of critical infrastructure. Cybersecurity attacks may threaten energy systems, nuclear resources, water systems, aviation systems, and food and agriculture systems. Sophisticated attacks may even support espionage, extract high-value intellectual property, and compromise networks to lay a foundation for future exploits.

To combat critical infrastructure cybersecurity threats, nations and government agencies must measure, monitor, and understand the nature of threats as well as the performance of their security programs and controls. Until recently, the task of gathering and processing cyber threat intelligence and monitoring security controls has primarily been a manual process. As a result, governments and agencies often lack visibility into critical infrastructure cybersecurity. As threats continue to develop and spread, organizations charged with protecting national security need a more efficient way to develop the intelligence that can drive security strategy and policy.

Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure

Bitsight is the world’s leading Security Rating Service, transforming the way companies manage information security risk with objective, verifiable, and actionable security ratings.

Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure provides greater visibility and context around the cyber threats confronting nation states. Bitsight ratings detail the cyber threats occurring in a geographic area, providing government stakeholders with a better understanding of trends occurring within their country. Furthermore, government actors can execute searches on threat intelligence at a country-wide level and develop strategic plans to reduce and prevent cybercrime.

With Bitsight, governments can benchmark the security performance of their nation against others and review how key industries in their country perform when compared to industries in other nations. Bitsight ratings are available through a secure portal and an API that enables integration with other platforms.

Bitsight Sovereign Security Ratings are an objective and verifiable measurement of a country’s relative security performance. Updated daily, ratings are based on a broad array of vectors in four classes of externally observable data: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and public disclosures. The higher the rating, the more effective a nation is at implementing good security practices across its networks.

Benefits of Bitsight’s critical infrastructure cybersecurity ratings

By regularly rating critical infrastructure cybersecurity, nations can:

Benchmark national security performance

Bitsight’s unique data and insights enable governments to understand their country’s national cybersecurity performance. With Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure, governments can benchmark their own security performance against counterparts to understand how key industries perform when compared to other nations. With these insights, governments identify security shortcomings, set realistic targets, create security plans, and reduce cyber risk.

Continuously monitor critical infrastructure cybersecurity

Bitsight delivers actionable and continuous insight into cyber risks threatening a nation. Rather than relying on subjective, outdated datasets, governments leverage Bitsight to continuously and automatically measure, monitor, and learn more about specific cybersecurity risks. Bitsight reveals the prevalence of risks and vulnerabilities within the country, and the specific risks facing critical organizations. Bitsight ratings also issue alerts when the security posture of agencies or nations change or deviate from established risk thresholds.

Inform decision-making with forensic data

Bitsight Sovereign Security Ratings reveal data-driven risk insights so stakeholders make better decisions to improve security postures and address risk. Forensic details and infection data help cybersecurity teams facilitate remediation. Government stakeholders review cybersecurity trends within their nation, execute searches on a country-wide level, and put plans in place to reduce risk and prevent cybercrime.

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. 

Managing Vendor Risk with Cyber Security Monitoring

Continuous monitoring has long played a role in helping businesses to avoid unfavorable outcomes from cybersecurity threats. Today, many organizations are employing continuous cyber security monitoring to better remediate risk within their third-party networks.

Continuous monitoring is far more effective than traditional approaches that rely on yearly point-in-time assessments. By constantly aggregating data from a multitude of sources and analyzing it for trends and anomalies, continuous cyber security monitoring provides third-party risk managers with unprecedented insight into the risk and security performance of their third-party vendors.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management includes continuous monitoring capabilities that enable organizations to easily optimize third-party risk management programs and achieve significant and measurable cyber risk reduction.

Why continuous monitoring is essential

For years, third-party cyber risk assessment has relied on questionnaires completed yearly to evaluate the security posture of each vendor. Continuous cyber security monitoring offers significant advantages over these traditional risk management solutions. The benefits of continuous monitoring include:

• Daily assessment. Yearly assessments enable risk managers to gauge the risk posed by each vendor once every 12 months. Continuous monitoring provides a daily opportunity to reevaluate the security posture of each vendor and to take action when a vulnerability is detected.
• Objective information. Annual questionnaires are submitted by vendors themselves. Consequently, they offer a more subjective view of a vendor’s risk and are only as accurate as the person who completes the form. Continuous monitoring is based on objective, verifiable data, offering more context and helping to verify the accuracy of assessments submitted by vendors.
• Automated processes. Where questionnaires involve many manual processes, continuous monitoring is automated to minimize the burden on security teams and third-party risk managers.
• Faster evaluation. Annual assessments simply can’t keep pace with the speed with which cyber threats evolve and execute. Continuous monitoring enables organizations to identify threats much sooner and move more quickly to remediate them, offering greater digital risk protection.

Cyber Security Monitoring with Bitsight

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management includes continuous monitoring technology that gives vendor risk managers a complete and trusted view into their risk portfolio. Rather than relying on yearly assessments or security information submitted by vendors themselves, organizations can use Bitsight Security Ratings to continuously monitor the security status and posture of every vendor in their portfolio.

Bitsight Security Ratings provide a daily security score that reflects each vendor’s cybersecurity posture. Security Ratings are based on risk factors like botnet infections, filesharing behavior, out-of-date devices, TLS/SSL certificates, and other data. With Bitsight’s cyber security monitoring technology scanning each vendor’s security posture for changes in behavior or potential concerns, organizations get an updated, comprehensive view into risk within their third-party portfolio.

Bitsight Security Ratings have proven to correlate with the risk of data breaches. Research shows that a company’s overall rating, along with its grades in specific risk categories, can help to reliably predict security performance over time if conditions remain the same. Organizations can also rely on Bitsight ratings to create measurable value in vendor relationships. Additional research has shown that companies with strong cyber security performance and higher Bitsight ratings will financially outperform market peers by up to 7%.

Benefits of Continuous Cyber Security Monitoring

By implementing Bitsight and a strategy for continuous monitoring of third-party risk, organizations can:

• Gain greater visibility into vendor risk. By integrating continuous cyber security monitoring into the vendor risk landscape, risk managers get visibility beyond the obvious points of risk for each vendor. Daily Security Ratings may reveal critical external vulnerability data like on-premise cyber data, subsidiaries and geos, cloud data, firewalls, SIEMs, shadow IT, and remote office networks accessed by employees.
• Risk evaluation through the entire vendor lifecycle.. By adding continuous monitoring to the entire vendor risk management program, organizations can take advantage of automated, data-driven processes to evaluate risk during onboarding and throughout the vendor relationship.
• Provide executives and the board with reliable metrics and meaningful context. Continuous cyber security monitoring lets security managers deliver timelier and more accurate data to an organization’s leaders and board. Bitsight enables risk managers to share security benchmarks that can help to justify budgets, illuminate performance, and facilitate data-driven conversations around risk management.

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 Cyber Security Monitoring of Third Parties?

The value of measurement in cyber security and risk management

Cyber risk is an ever-present fact of life in today’s business environment. To improve their cyber security, organizations need better visibility into where risk exists in their own ecosystem – and with their third-party landscape. With a clear picture of the risk landscape, business leaders can make better decisions about how to prioritize cybersecurity investments and what controls to adopt to mitigate risk.

Continuous monitoring is key to managing risk over time. With a constant view into the effectiveness of security programs, organizations can refine risk management efforts to address new vulnerabilities as well as breakdowns in controls and security hygiene.

Bitsight can help. With solutions and tools for continuous monitoring, broad measurement, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight gives organizations clear insight into the performance of their security programs and helps improve planning for cyber security and risk management.

The five key elements in managing cyber security performance

Cyber security and risk management are priority #1 for CISOs today. Security practices, outcomes, and organizational failures are constantly under scrutiny by boards, partners, regulators, and investors. Traditional point-in-time operational metrics are no longer adequate for measuring security performance. These approaches lack context, are difficult to interpret, leave too many gaps, and are not relevant to how businesses think about cybersecurity performance. Superior cyber security and risk management require a standard, objective, independent, and quantitative metric to evaluate the effectiveness of security efforts over time.

A successful cyber security and risk management strategy must include five key elements:

1. KPIs like security ratings can provide a common language to define risk tolerance and how you’ll define success
2. Planning can help to align your program to key areas of focus for risk reduction across the business.
3. Allocating and prioritizing resources in the right places to focus efforts on key areas of improvement.
4. Continuous monitoring can identify new risk or control failures, allowing you to address issues and establish SLA’s for remediation with vendors.
5. Reporting can establish a regular measurement cadence to understand how controls are having an impact over time and where adjustments are necessary.

These key elements of a mature cyber security and risk management program deliver greater security visibility. They also allow organizations to shift from a reactive state to a proactive approach using independent, objective, and data-driven methods to evaluate performance.

Bitsight for Security Performance Management

Bitsight for Security Performance Management provides an outcome-driven approach to cyber security and risk management. With Bitsight, security and risk leaders can reduce cyber risk through greater visibility into their program’s security performance. CISOs and their organizations can efficiently allocate resources to the greatest areas of cyber risk and the programs that will deliver the highest impact over time.

Bitsight for Security Performance Management provides comprehensive tools for cyber security and risk management.

• Attack surface analytics enable organizations to manage their digital footprint and assess cyber risk exposure throughout the digital ecosystem.
• Internal assessments expose how an organization’s security posture is viewed by others.
• Benchmarking establishes baseline metrics and performance against industry peers.
• Executive reporting effectively indicates key metrics to stakeholders through customized, actionable reports.
• Forecasting suggests future ratings based on the details of a cyber security plan and makes it easy to track progress toward goals over time.
• Peer analytics provide an in-depth view of how an organization compares to other similar organizations.
• NIST & ISO framework mapping correlates an organization’s results to broadly adopted security frameworks.

Benefits for cyber security performance and risk management

With Bitsight for Security Performance Management, organizations can:

• Maintain continuous visibility into an expanding digital footprint.
• Identify gaps in cyber security and risk management programs through continuous monitoring.
• Drive accountability for security outcomes throughout the organization.
• Ensure that investments in security controls are efficient and effective.
• Improve visibility into cyber risk across all digital assets.
• Prioritize remediation efforts and cybersecurity budgets based on risk.
• Measure and quantify the impact and effectiveness of security investments.
• Enhance the effectiveness of security tools, technologies, and people through more informed decision-making.
• Continuously improve the organization’s cyber health.

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 the key to effective cyber security and risk management?

Managing risk with a cyber security analysis

Cyber security analysis is an indispensable tool for managing security performance and third-party risk. IT environments today are constantly expanding to encompass cloud services, BYOD devices, and an increasingly hybrid workforce. This evolution of the traditional IT environment offers unprecedented opportunities for forward-thinking organizations, but it introduces many new risks as well. A growing digital footprint inevitably means a larger attack surface, making it harder for security teams to manage risk and mitigate threats.

A superior cyber security analysis enables security leaders to mitigate risk by providing greater visibility into an organization’s security performance and the security posture of third-party vendors. With solutions that enable continuous monitoring, security teams respond more quickly to an evolving threat landscape and shifting levels of risk.

Bitsight provides cyber security analysis solutions that enable risk and security teams to make better, faster decisions about cyber risk within their organization and their supply chain.

The essentials of cyber security analysis

When performing a cyber security analysis, security teams better prioritize resources and address security risks when they know which metrics have the greatest correlation to breach.

A 2022 study by the Marsh McLennan Cyber Risk Analytics Center concluded that poor performance in several areas significantly increases an organization’s risk of experiencing a cyber security event, while solid performance implies a lower risk of incident. These areas include metrics such as:

• Patching cadence – how diligently an organization applies patches that remediate software vulnerabilities.
• Desktop software – whether browser and operating system versions are kept up-to-date across all devices.
• Potentially exploited systems – the number of devices running malicious software or unwanted programs.
• Mobile software – whether the software on cell phones and tablets is updated.
• Botnet infections – the number of devices observed serving as bots or participating in botnets.
• Insecure systems – the number of endpoints communicating with an unintended destination.
• User behavior – how often employees engage in potentially risky behavior such as sharing files over peer-to-peer networks.
• TLS/SSL configurations – whether security encryption software is correctly configured and utilizes robust encryption protocols.
• Open ports – which port numbers and services are exposed to the internet.
• Spam propagation – whether an organization is infected with malware that sends spam.

In addition to these specific metrics, the study found that security and risk teams can rely on Bitsight Security Ratings as an overall measurement of an organization’s cyber security performance.

Bitsight Ratings enable cyber security analysis

Bitsight is trusted by the world’s largest organizations to achieve digital resilience by gaining greater visibility into their security performance and the security posture of third-party vendors.

Bitsight Security Ratings are generated from objective, verifiable information about a company’s security performance. Bitsight’s daily ratings provide a data-driven, dynamic, quantitative measurement of an organization’s overall security posture as well as specifics about individual risk vectors such as those identified by Marsh McLennan.

Bitsight draws data from over 100 sources to illuminate 23 key risk vectors – twice as many as competing security rating organizations. Bitsight also provides the most accurate network assets map and manages the largest botnet sinkholing infrastructure, providing deeper visibility into compromised systems. With Bitsight, organizations can also access 12 months of historical data to identify trends and understand risk more easily.

Because Bitsight Security Ratings are updated daily, they support cyber security analysis and continuous monitoring with near real-time data. A Bitsight study, independently verified by Air Worldwide and IHS Markit, verified that Bitsight Security Ratings correlate with the risk of a data breach. According to the study’s findings, for example, companies with a Bitsight rating of 500 or lower are nearly 5 times more likely to experience a breach than those with a rating of 700 or more.

Analyzing security and risk with Bitsight solutions

From enhancing reputational risk management to improving software supply chain security, Bitsight enables organizations to achieve measurable objectives around mitigating risk. Bitsight offers several solutions that security teams rely on for cyber security analyses.

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables organizations to assess internal security performance over time. This solution for cyber security analysis helps security teams benchmark against peers and competitors, forecast future performance, set realistic goals, and track progress with data based on an external view of an organization’s network.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management empowers teams to continually assess and monitor cyber risk throughout a third-party ecosystem. With Bitsight’s vendor risk monitoring solutions, teams increase vendor due diligence and collaborate with vendors to quickly remediate security issues throughout the supply chain.
• Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics delivers visibility into the complete digital ecosystem and the risks associated with each digital asset. With Bitsight, security teams can manage and reduce the attack surface by discovering hidden assets and cloud instances, visualizing areas of disproportionate risk, and deploying security controls to mitigate them.
• Bitsight Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk makes cyber risk quantification accessible, available, and actionable for everyone. This cyber security analysis tool provides a quick, efficient, and repeatable assessment of financial exposure related to cyber risk.

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.

What is a cyber security plan?

A cyber security plan specifies the security policies, procedures, and controls required to protect an organization against threats and risk. A cyber security plan can also outline the specific steps to take to respond to a breach.

Refining Your Cyber Security Plan with Data and Metrics

A cyber security plan is the centerpiece of any effort to defend against attacks and mitigate risk in IT environments. Cyber security plans cover the strategy, policy, procedures, and technologies your organization will rely on when seeking to heighten cyber risk management and implement successful security programs.

Data and metrics are critical to every cyber security plan. By providing greater visibility into the attack surface and measuring the effectiveness of security controls, data and metrics enable your security leaders to focus resources on addressing the largest areas of risk while benchmarking performance against competitors and peers.

Bitsight provides a suite of cyber security and risk management solutions that help organizations create, measure, and refine effective and efficient cyber security plans. With Bitsight, cyber security risk management teams have the objective, verifiable information they need to confidently make informed decisions and drive data-driven conversations about security and risk.

Developing a Data Breach Response Plan

Determining how an organization will respond to a data breach is an essential part of every cyber security plan. When a breach occurs, have a pre-established data breach response plan enables security leaders to take immediate action to minimize damage to data, reputation, and the bottom line without having to spend time defining ownership and responsibilities.

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. What types of data constitute a data incident? This information is key to knowing when to trigger a data breach response plan. A breach including sensitive data most likely will require activating your incident response plan. Sensitive data may include customer information, company information, user credentials, intellectual property, or data on a vendor’s network. Depending on the type of data that is breached, you may be required to notify customers as part of your response plan.
2. Who is responsible for what during a data breach?. Your data breach response plan should list the people responsible for stopping the breach and remediating damage. A legal team may need to weigh in if customers' protected information was involved. You may need the communications team to help with crisis management and public relations. The HR department may be required to help if employee information was involved. Responding to data breaches of a certain size will likely need to involve C-suite executives.
3. How does the internal escalation process work?. When an employee discovers a potential breach, there must be a concrete plan for how that information gets escalated internally up the chain to different departments that is also agreed upon by everyone involved.
4. How does the external escalation process work?. When should you get help from outside partners and what kind of help might you need? These external resources often include forensic investigation teams or legal resources.

Like every other part of a cyber security plan, a data breach response plan relies on superior metrics. When a breach is detected, Bitsight metrics can help identify where vulnerabilities are present in the network, helping to speed remediation. After remediation, Bitsight cyber risk monitoring tools can help to see if problems in systems have been truly addressed or if vulnerabilities are still present in your network.

Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight is the most widely adopted Security Ratings solution in the world. Bitsight ratings offer a data-driven, dynamic measurement of the cybersecurity performance of an organization and its third-party vendors. Bitsight analyzes vast amounts of externally observable data to produce daily security ratings that range from 250 to 900. The higher the rating, the more effective the company’s security practices the lower the likelihood of a breach.

Bitsight Security Ratings are based on four categories of data – compromised systems, security intelligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. In addition to an overall rating for each company, Bitsight provides data on specific ratings for certain risk factors and individual digital assets.

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the data and metrics security leaders need when crafting a cyber security plan or cyber risk management framework. Bitsight’s data can help to identify risk throughout an organization’s attack surface or vendor ecosystem. Additionally, Bitsight can measure the effectiveness of controls selected to mitigate risk and improve security, and benchmark an organization’s performance against peers and competitors. Ultimately, Bitsight provides the clear, objective, and continuous data that security leaders need to refine their cyber security risk management process.

Benefits for Cyber Security Plans

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform offers a suite of solutions that security leaders can take advantage of when crafting cyber security plans.

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Bitsight helps organizations measurably reduce cyber risk through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting. With Bitsight, security and risk leaders can continuously monitor, measure, and communicate the efficacy of the controls they have in place to keep their organization secure. Bitsight’s metrics enable security leaders to make faster, data-driven decisions about where the biggest risks to the organization exist, and where to direct resources to remediate them.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management. Bitsight provides continuous monitoring capabilities that let third-party risk management teams better track the security performance of vendors without having to sit back and rely on vendors self-reporting their cybersecurity data. Bitsight immediately exposes cyber risk within the supply chain and helps to prioritize resources on remediating the most dangerous issues to measurably reduce cyber risk.
• Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking. With Bitsight, organizations can continuously monitor and assess their security posture and benchmark their performance against industry peers and competitors. Bitsight security ratings provide a continuous, data-driven measure of performance on a wide range of risk factors for a company and its competitors.
• Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. Bitsight enables security leaders to get a handle on risk hidden throughout their entire network landscape, including digital assets in the cloud, subsidiaries, geographies, and the remote workforce. With greater visibility into the attack surface and the risks within it, security teams can discover shadow IT and visualize areas of greatest risk to prioritize remediation.

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.

FAQs: What is a cyber security plan?