Insights blog.

Within the Bitsight Security Ratings platform, we prioritize features that help organizations both identify and manage risks across their own networks and the networks of their third parties. Bitsight now enables users to identify organizations who are potentially vulnerable to VPNFilter malware or Oracle’s WebLogic server problems.

In today’s business world, the desire to transact in the digital realm is dramatically accelerating and, unfortunately, so is the cyber risk that one takes on as a result. Organizations that handle sensitive data are more likely to become the targets of hackers who are looking to exploit this information stored within their network. Businesses now find themselves exposed to a growing “Cyber Risk Gap.” This gap is the outcome of the combined impact of the following:  

If you’re involved in a healthcare-based organization, you’ve likely noticed the push for stronger vendor security and vendor risk management (VRM) practices. There are a few reasons for this.

After the initial analysis of the WannaCry ransomware attacks, our Research & Development team put together a global assessment of the impacts and repair process needed for affected systems to recover. 

Right now, the UK is in political turmoil, which makes any long-term cyber security predictions difficult. But it is possible to make statements about cybersecurity in the short term.

A new security vulnerability in an older version of TLS / SSL was announced this week and has been named “DROWN” by its authors (Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption). It’s estimated to affect up to 11 million servers using the TLS / SSL protocol, from websites to e-mail servers. This unique attack allows a third-party who has intercepted encrypted traffic between a client and an unaffected server, such as one only supporting TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, to use another server that is using the same RSA private / public key-pair to act as an oracle to decrypt the intercepted traffic. This leads to a larger attack surface than would normally be exposed if the vulnerability were isolated to a single host since it allows an adversary to perform a “cross-protocol” attack by taking advantage of servers sharing the same TLS / SSL certificates.

Bitsight’s Third Annual Bitsight Insights Industry Benchmarking Report looked at some of the major SSL vulnerabilities affecting organizations, including Heartbleed, POODLE and FREAK. Bitsight’s analysis found that a sizeable number of companies across all industries were still running services that were vulnerable to these flaws. As mentioned in our report, businesses can leverage this information as a measure to ensure that proper controls are being met internally. In addition, companies can gain insight into the performance of their key third party vendors when it comes to ensuring that they aren’t running vulnerable services.

Many of the facts surrounding the Target breach still remain unclear, even as details continue to emerge publicly. We still don’t know what the final tally of breached organizations will be, but the list keeps growing. In addition to who else has been breached and the impact on their customers, another factor we need to consider is how Target's business partners may be impacted. In a data breach on any retailer, card issuers, payment processors, insurers, suppliers and other parties may face substantial loss as the investigation and recovery costs ripple through these networks.

In light of the recent news of retailers being attacked late last year, we at Bitsight looked into our security ratings (an external measure of a company’s security posture) to gain some insight into these attacks.