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, with the current achievable range being 300-820, 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?

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.