Improving security posture with cyber risk ratings

Cyber risk ratings are an important tool that can help organizations make more effective decisions about security and risk. Cyber risk ratings, or security ratings, provide an objective measurement of an organization’s overall security performance. These metrics help to identify and quantify risk throughout the digital ecosystem, enabling security teams to prioritize remediation and monitor cyber hygiene. Cyber ratings can also expose issues within the supply chain, pinpointing risk and vulnerabilities in vendors’ IT environments.

Perhaps most importantly, cybersecurity ratings provide everyone in the organization with a way of talking about security and risk. Executives and Board members with little technical knowledge can easily understand cyber risk ratings with the context that accompanies them. As a result, ratings help to drive productive conversations around security and allow leadership to make decisions about funding priorities based on a clear understanding of risk.

As the world’s leading Security Ratings service, Bitsight provides a platform with a comprehensive suite of solutions for measuring and benchmarking security performance, mitigating third-party risk, and visualizing and remediating risk throughout an organization’s digital footprint.

The business value of cyber risk ratings

Bitsight Security Ratings provide powerful benefits for many areas of security.

Continuously monitor security performance

Bitsight’s daily cyber risk ratings serve as a continuous monitoring solution, delivering near-real-time insight into security posture and shining a spotlight on security performance gaps.

Mitigate third-party risk

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management exposes cyber risk within the supply chain, focusing resources on remediation and providing the cybersecurity risk assessments security teams need to achieve measurable risk reduction.

Visualize the attack surface

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics delivers unprecedented cybersecurity visibility into the attack surface, helping security teams identify assets throughout the digital ecosystem and the risks associated with them. A centralized dashboard shows the location of digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit.

Improve security performance

Bitsight cyber risk ratings enable security teams to understand the success of individual security controls, helping to bring the organization more closely in line with cybersecurity maturity models.

How Bitsight ratings are calculated

Bitsight’s cyber risk metrics are based on externally observable data – no information is required from the organization being rated. Bitsight pools information regarding 25 key risk vectors from 120+ sources, appraising an organization’s security performance in four categories: security diligence, user behavior, compromised systems, and data breaches. Using a proprietary algorithm, Bitsight analyzes, classifies, and weights security data to produce a daily rating ranging from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820. The higher the rating, the stronger the organization’s security posture.

In addition to an overall rating for security performance, Bitsight provides granular detail about an organization’s performance against individual risk vectors such as botnet infections, spam propagation, malware servers, potentially exploited machines, and unsolicited communications. Risk vectors also include open ports, patching cadence, insecure systems, file-sharing behavior, and exposed credentials.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight cyber risk ratings can help organizations benchmark their security performance against industry peers and monitor their ongoing cybersecurity posture. Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking provide quantified baseline and comparative data to help security teams measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs over time.

Using externally observable data, Bitsight continuously analyzes, rates, and monitors security posture, generating alerts when significant changes occur. With visibility into a wealth of risk vector data on the company and its peers, security teams can benchmark performance on a wide set of actionable security data.

With Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking, security teams can:

• Identify security issues. Bitsight provides information on which infections are targeting peer companies, enabling security teams to understand industry-specific threats.
• Communicate performance. Bitsight cyber risk ratings serve as key performance indicators, enabling security teams to effectively communicate findings and contextual performance to executives and the Board.
• Strengthen reputational risk management. The ability to show progress in security programs is used by many companies as a competitive differentiator.
• Detailed forensics. Bitsight’s actionable Forensics package shows infections observed on a network and provides detailed specifics that allow security teams to remediate potentially harmful issues right at the core.

Why choose cyber risk ratings from 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.