What is Cybersecurity Data?

Cybersecurity data is any information that helps security leaders and risk managers to better identify risk within an organization and its vendor network. Cybersecurity data may also include metrics and cyber risk analytics about the performance of security controls and programs.

Make More Informed Decisions with Cybersecurity Data

More companies today are actively seeking cybersecurity data that can help to measure the risk of a breach. Cyber threats continue to proliferate, growing in sophistication and severity. To avoid the cost and damage of a successful breach, security leaders need cyber risk metrics that can better identify vulnerabilities and gaps in security controls.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight Security Ratings offer a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Based on objective, verifiable data, Bitsight’s ratings enable continuous monitoring and assessment to help organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and third-party risk management.

Bitsight’s Security Ratings Correlate to Breaches

Security incidents and data breaches are on the rise. Breaches originating from compromised vendors and third parties are especially prevalent. According to a recent study1, more than two-thirds of organizations have experienced a data breach as a result of vendor access. To protect their organizations, risk managers need cybersecurity data and metrics that can identify potential risks in vendor networks more effectively.

That’s where Bitsight comes in. Bitsight is the only security ratings platform proven to correlate with an organization’s likelihood of suffering a data breach. In a study that analyzed security ratings and breaches for more than 27,000 companies over a two-year period, Bitsight’s data scientists determined that companies with higher Bitsight Security Ratings are less likely to experience a publicly disclosed breach. As validated by AIR Worldwide2, companies with a Bitsight Security Rating of 500 or lower are nearly 5 times more likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 700 or above.

With cybersecurity data and Security Ratings from Bitsight, organizations can:

• Continuously monitor vendors to reduce third-party risk. Security teams can prioritize which vendors need additional assessment and communicate with vendors to ensure that issues are being addressed.
• Benchmark their security performance. Risk managers can more easily communicate with executives and the board about what ratings mean and what they suggest for priorities and investments. Security leaders can remediate issues with detailed cybersecurity forensics to reduce the risk of a breach.
• Monitor merger and acquisition targets. Bitsight Security Ratings enable M&A teams to identify security problems at any time throughout the M&A process from discovery through due diligence and purchase.

1Bomgar 2017 Secure Access Threat Rep 2http://www.air-worldwide.com/Publications/Infographics/Global-Cyber-Resilience

Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight has been analyzing the security performance of organizations since 2011. Today, Bitsight is the most widely used security ratings platform across all industries.

Bitsight Security Ratings are based on analysis of vast amounts of data related to security issues. Derived from more than 120 externally verifiable data sources, Bitsight daily ratings provide immediate insight into the security performance of an organization and the security posture of its vendors.

Bitsight Security ratings are based on four data categories.

• Compromised systems. These include potentially exploited machines or devices that are infected with botnets, that are malware servers, or that are sending large amounts of unwanted email.
• Diligence. Diligence records document the actions a company has taken to prevent attacks. Bitsight gathers cybersecurity data on open ports, TLS/SSL certificates, web application headers, patching cadence, insecure systems, domain squatting, and more.
• User behavior. Bitsight examines activities that may introduce malicious software onto a corporate network. For instance, evidence of exposed credentials and software shared via peer-to-peer exchange protocols may affect a company’s security ratings.
• Public disclosures. Bitsight collects information about publicly disclosed breaches and interruptions to business continuity.

The Benefits of Bitsight’s Cybersecurity Data

Bitsight Security Ratings can help security leaders manage risk and improve security performance throughout the organization.

In third-party risk management, Bitsight helps to expose cyber risk within the supply chain, enabling third-party risk managers to work with vendors to achieve significant and measurable risk reduction. With Bitsight, risk managers have clear and immediate visibility into the risk posture of each vendor, helping to accelerate onboarding, enhance business enablement, and reduce cyber risk throughout the third-party network.

In security performance management. Bitsight enables security and risk leaders to measure the performance of their programs and align investments with the actions that will have the most impact over time. With Bitsight, security professionals can more effectively allocate limited resources to the areas of highest risk within the organization. With timely, accurate cybersecurity data, security leaders can answer cybersecurity questions from the board and C-suite and facilitate data-driven conversations about risk and security.

Why Rely on Security Data 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.

FAQs: What is Cybersecurity Data?

The Benefits Of Cyber Security Risk Assessment Reports

Reporting plays a critical role in security risk assessment. By providing metrics that measure the presence of risk in your digital ecosystem and the effectiveness of your risk management decisions and processes, your cyber risk reports can help you prioritize your remediation efforts to focus on the areas of greatest risk and the actions that will have the most impact.

Too often, however, a cyber security risk assessment report provides too little or too much information to be useful. Reports that deliver numbers without insights or context are likely to be overlooked, and reports that are too technical will are unhelpful to executives and board members who lack the in-depth knowledge of cybersecurity.

Bitsight can help. With powerful reporting capabilities and the most widely adopted security ratings platform, Bitsight makes it easy to generate cyber security risk assessment reports that serve the needs of every stakeholder while minimizing the time required from security leaders and risk managers.

Preparing A Cyber Security Risk Assessment Report

Following several best practices can help to ensure that your cyber security risk assessment reports are meaningful, easy to understand, and helpful to stakeholders throughout the organization. When preparing your reports, be sure to:

• Convey actionable information in context. Put findings in context by comparing metrics to past performance, peers, and competitors. Include information on what’s at stake financially based on your current risk posture. Compare your findings to standard cybersecurity frameworks for your industry.
• Keep key findings concise. Summarize critical findings and place the highest risk items front and center in the report.
• Make the language clear for a non-technical audience. Avoid jargon and overly technical language for reports being shown to executives and areas of the business outside of cybersecurity. Use a risk score to make key findings and recommendations easier to understand.
• Relate findings to cyber risk. Risk-based reporting is the approach that’s best suited to reducing your organization’s actual exposure to cyber threats. Following a risk-based approach can help everyone in the organization focus on the most significant issues. Framing risk in business terms can help executives and leaders to understand the ramifications of your findings.

Assessing Risk With Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight enables your security leaders and risk managers to quickly and easily produce cyber security risk assessment reports that follow best practices while promoting efficiency throughout your cybersecurity program. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities are based on information available from Bitsight Security Ratings, which are an external, objective measurement of an organization’s security performance. Similar to credit ratings that evaluate companies based on external information, Bitsight Security Ratings are produced by analyzing objective, verifiable data about an organization’s security posture.

Security Ratings data is collected from 120+ sources that cover 25 different risk vectors. Bitsight uses a proprietary algorithm to analyze and classify externally observable data concerning compromised systems, issues with security diligence, potentially risky user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Ratings are a simple, quantitative metric and range from 250 to 900 – the higher the number, the better the overall security posture of the organization, and the lower likelihood of bad actors successfully infiltrating the network.

Research shows that Bitsight Security Ratings are proven to correlate to the risk of a data breach. For example, companies with a rating of 500 or lower are nearly 5 times more likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 700 or higher.

Armed with Bitsight Security Ratings, your teams can generate cyber security risk assessment reports that provide a clear view of your company’s security performance and the security posture of your third-party vendors.

Bitsight’s Reporting Capabilities

Based on Bitsight Security Ratings, Bitsight reports allow your cybersecurity and risk management teams to communicate more effectively with executives, board members, partners, vendors, and each other. Bitsight’s reporting interface makes it easy to find the reports you need and to present the metrics and context that are most meaningful for each conversation with different stakeholders.

Bitsight cyber security risk assessment reports are grouped into broad categories to help get you started, including.

• Overview and executive reporting. Executives, board members, and other company decision-makers need reports that communicate straightforward facts about security performance in relation to the overall business, risk within vendor networks, plans for remediation, and ROI on previous investments. In third-party risk management, these reports summarize risk across the vendor portfolio, help managers determine risk of specific vendors in relation to each other, which can contribute to the tier a vendor is placed into, and show how to mitigate third party risk most effectively.
• History and trends. These include cyber security risk assessment reports that provide a detailed look at how all aspects of security programs stack up against those of competitors, partners, vendors, and industry leaders. Benchmarking reports provides insights into how well security performance measures up to industry leaders, helping security teams to set goals more effectively.

Additional Bitsight reports include findings and infrastructure details that focus specifically on domain and platform construction, behavior of threats in your system, and how your organization is using the Bitsight platform. Reports about risk assessment questionnaires help guide organizations as they prepare for and complete assessments like the NIST CSF and ISO/IEC 27001 questionnaires.

In addition to reports, solutions like Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provide an at-a-glance view of risk in dashboards and in a cyber security risk assessment matrix or a vendor portfolio overview report. These solutions provide highly effective tools to help security and risk leaders identify and assess risk and prioritize remediation efforts.

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 A Cyber Security Risk Assessment Report?

Definition: Cyber risk analytics encompasses technologies and methodologies for identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risk within an organization.

Topics:

• Cyber risk analytics evaluate the growing complexity of your digital infrastructure.
• What are cyber security analytics (and security ratings)?
• 7 use cases for Bitsight risk analytics.

Gain Greater Visibility With Cyber Risk Analytics

As your digital footprint expands, it’s harder for your security teams to know where to prioritize cybersecurity investments. Your enterprise may have multiple business units, subsidiaries, and disparate geolocations, each representing a different level of risk exposure.

This complex structure makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly where the highest concentration of risk exists.

Bitsight offers a simple way to quickly identify risk concentration and enhances security posture across your distributed enterprise.

By helping you quickly and easily assess cyber risk exposure throughout your enterprise, Bitsight enables you to measure and report on the security performance of every business unit and focus remediation efforts for the greatest impact.

The Challenge Of Managing Risk

To manage risk effectively, you must have complete visibility of all the assets in your digital ecosystem and the level of risk each asset represents.

However, this task grows more difficult each year as your digital footprint expands through growth, mergers, acquisitions, more vendor relationships, cloud migration, and the use of home and remote offices.v

Many organizations have hundreds of distinct organizational groups. These diverse departments, business units, subsidiaries, centers, and divisions are often located in disparate geographic locations.

Additionally, each of these units likely has a unique structure, function, and points of digital exposure – and a unique level of cyber risk. This complex collection of business entities makes it difficult to assess risk, and even harder to know how to prioritize remediation.

Cyber Risk Analytics FAQs

Bitsight’s Cyber Risk Analytics Use Cases

As part of the suite of solutions offered by Bitsight Security Performance Management, Bitsight Enterprise Analytics let you quickly gain insight into risk introduced through mergers, acquisitions, subsidiaries, and business units.

Bitsight’s cyber risk analytics solution enables you to:

• Align security programs with business objectives. Bitsight cyber risk analytics help you align the security performance of business units, geographies, and subsidiaries with the security posture of your entire organization.
• Monitor performance across the organization. Get an at-a-glance view of the security performance of multiple groups throughout a complex organization in one simplified tool.
• Discover group-based security performance issues. Get real-time, objective data and metrics to uncover the issues within each business group that most significantly impact security performance.
• Enforce security controls. Automatically create an action plan for subsidiaries and risk vectors based on the potential impact on your organization when one of the sub-organizations experiences a cyber threat.
• Allocate security resources effectively. Prioritize efforts and investments to the areas of the enterprise that can have the most significant impact on security performance.
• Build more informed plans for improvement. Set performance targets and create improvement plans for each business group.
• Produce more effective reports. Provide senior executives and board members with cyber risk reports that effectively measure the security performance of different units and answer critical cybersecurity questions.

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