Cyber exposure is the risk associated with all the vulnerabilities and threats to networks, data, applications, and systems in an organization’s IT environment.
Cyber exposure management is a security practice designed to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities and threats within an organization's digital ecosystem. By identifying cyber exposure, organizations can calculate the level of risk associated with each exposure, evaluate the effectiveness of security controls intended to mitigate each type of risk, and prioritize the steps required to improve security programs and remediate vulnerabilities.
More organizations today are realizing that cyber risk is business risk, prompting boards of directors to ask hard questions around exposure management. For CISOs and risk leaders, it’s a time of enormous change—but also a time of significant opportunity. Boards are looking to their CISOs to not only protect the organization from risk, but to lead the business as it navigates waves of disruption from expanding infrastructure, changing work models, and sophisticated cyber threats.
Given these expectations, CISOs need powerful solutions to manage growing cyber risk and uncertainty. The right solutions will uncover blind spots of exposure and quantify the impact of that exposure in business terms. A cyber risk management solution must measure efforts to manage risk, revealing what the organization is doing right and where more investment is needed to address areas of disproportionate risk.
As the global leader and category creator in the cybersecurity ratings industry, Bitsight now delivers solutions that empower CISOs and risk professionals to more effectively and holistically manage cyber risk and improve exposure management. With Bitsight, CISOs can demonstrate where the organization is exposed, what the current and potential financial risks are to the organization, and how risk management and security programs are performing.
Your CISOs and risk leaders can enhance exposure management by focusing on four key initiatives.
Security vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and devices are constantly increasing. The number of new disclosed cyber vulnerabilities jumped 25 percent in 2022, and the number of “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022. To address vulnerabilities in your IT environment and your third-party ecosystem, your risk teams need tools to assess the level of potential exposure and prioritize the most dangerous vulnerabilities for remediation.
Identifying all the components of your attack surface grows more difficult as your IT environment evolves and your organization relies more heavily on cloud service providers. Lacking visibility into internal and external assets in your attack surface leaves you vulnerable to breaches, ransomware, and other cybersecurity incidents. To better manage your exposure, you need tools that deliver exceptional visibility into all aspects of your attack surface—on-premises, in the cloud, and throughout your supply chain.
A successful attack on a vendor can disrupt your business, cause financial losses, damage your reputation, and even compromise your own data and IT environment. Traditional solutions for third-party risk management such as periodic questionnaires and annual risk assessments make it difficult to accurately assess cyber risk, especially risk from emerging zero-day vulnerabilities. Effective exposure management requires tools to augment annual assessments with continuous monitoring of risk in third-party relationships.
Your security risk management teams must effectively communicate details around cybersecurity posture to essential stakeholders such as your board, executives, and the capital marketplace. Yet too often, security reports are presented with language, detail, and metrics that are difficult for non-technical stakeholders to digest and use for critical decisions. To keep stakeholders informed, prove performance, and facilitate better decision making, your teams need tools that can present exposure management details in language that is recognized and understood by a broad, external audience.
Enterprises of all sizes and industries rely on Bitsight to expand distributed ecosystems without expanding attack surfaces, accelerate transformation without accelerating financial woes, and add vendors without adding their vulnerabilities. Bitsight’s comprehensive and integrated cyber risk management capabilities help forward-thinking, growth-centered CISOs prioritize cybersecurity investments, build trust across their ecosystems, and minimize the likelihood of financial loss.
Our solution empowers CISOs and risk leaders to address all areas of exposure management.
All our solutions are powered by the Bitsight Cyber Risk Analytics Engine. This powerful technology processes 200 billion events daily and scans 40 million entities dating back 12 months to deliver market-leading data, insights, and workflows. The engine calculates and correlates business practices to negative outcomes and quantified risks, providing CISOs with actionable insights in enterprise security, digital supply chain, cyber insurance, and data analysis.
With Bitsight’s actionable risk insights, CISOs and risk leaders can:
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.
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:
Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.
Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.
Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.
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.
Cyber exposure management is the practice of continuously monitoring cyber exposure, measuring the effectiveness of security programs, and taking steps to address the areas of greatest risk and exposure.
CISOs and risk leaders today face a host of new challenges and opportunities. Massive digital footprints continue to expand, the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and insurance premiums are on the rise. At the same time, more boards of directors are accepting that cyber risk is business risk and are inviting CISOs to take a greater role in leading the company by enhancing cyber exposure management.
To excel in this expanded role, CISOs need exposure management tools that can help their organizations achieve alignment on how to quantify risk, manage it, and make the right investments to mitigate it. The right solutions must help CISOs uncover risk blind spots, assess performance, qualify vendors, and minimize financial loss at scale.
As a global cyber risk management leader, Bitsight offers cyber exposure management solutions that transform how organizations manage cyber exposure, security performance, and cyber risk for themselves and their third parties. Built on more than a decade of market-leading innovation, Bitsight offers integrated solutions that deliver value across enterprise security performance, digital supply chains, cyber insurance, and data analysis.
There are four key steps you can take to limit your organization’s cyber exposure and strengthen defenses against potential threats.
As your digital ecosystem expands, cyber risk management tools can constantly and automatically search for and identify areas of cyber exposure. Points of exposure may include misconfigured software, software vulnerabilities, unpatched systems, open ports, and other areas of risk that may easily be exploited by attackers. With superior technology, you can identify areas of disproportionate risk across your digital ecosystem and prioritize remediation to improve your security posture.
To effectively manage cyber exposure and mitigate risks, you’ll need the combined efforts of individuals from different business units and disciplines throughout your organization. Your CISO will lead efforts to manage immediate threats, but your legal team will need to jump in when customer data is exposed. Communications teams must craft messaging and reach out to customers, partners, and stakeholders in the event of a breach, and sales teams will need to do the same with prospects and partners. HR managers play an important role as well in helping to alleviate employee concerns.
When a breach occurs, your team will need to alert stakeholders, customers, vendors, employees, and partners about what has happened even as your technical teams work to mitigate the damage. Communication efforts should explain clearly what has happened, how it will impact each audience, and what you’re doing to address the problem now and in the future. An effective communications plan will mitigate long-term financial impact and reputational challenges.
Because the cyber threat landscape changes daily, you must continuously monitor the attack surface of both your organization and your third-party vendors to ensure the security controls in place meet your standards. This is a change from traditional third-party risk management practices that rely on annual or bi-annual questionnaires to monitor vendors’ security postures.
Having created the security ratings industry in 2011, Bitsight has expanded to offer integrated solutions that address the broader challenges of CISOs and risk leaders. As digital transformation, supply chain risk, and expanded attack surfaces create greater cyber exposure, our comprehensive approach to cyber risk management helps global enterprises, governments, and organizations prioritize cybersecurity investments, reduce the chances of financial loss, and build greater trust within their ecosystem.
As one of the core solutions on our platform, Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) is a cybersecurity governance and cyber exposure management solution that gives risk and security leaders unique insights to drive strategy and improve security performance. With Bitsight SPM, you can see what attackers see, understand your financial exposure, and prioritize remediation to address your most serious vulnerabilities. This cyber risk management solution empowers you to elevate cyber exposure management, confidently communicating and proving program performance to organizational leadership and board members.
Based on Bitsight’s Cyber Risk Analytics Engine that delivers market-leading data, insights, and workflows, SPM provides superior capabilities in several key areas.
Part of Bitsight SPM, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics delivers a comprehensive view of your attack surface both on-premises and in the cloud to enhance cyber exposure management. With this security risk management solution, you can continuously discover and segment the assets, applications, and devices that are part of your expanding digital footprint. Bitsight also makes it easy to assess current risk exposure, prioritize your most valuable assets, and take actions to reduce risk.
With Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, you can:
In addition to tools for managing security performance, Bitsight also offers third-party risk management capabilities with technology for vendor risk assessment and vendor risk monitoring to accurately identify and prioritize risk within larger digital ecosystems.
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.
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:
Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.
Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.
Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.
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.
