Cybersecurity Ratings

What are cybersecurity ratings?

Cybersecurity ratings are a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Ratings are derived from objective, verifiable information and are created by independent organizations. Security ratings may offer both a single KPI that represents the organization’s overall security posture as well as a cyber risk rating for security performance on key risk vectors.

What are the benefits of cybersecurity ratings?

Cybersecurity ratings are a tool that help security teams improve decision-making around issues of security and risk. Cybersecurity ratings can help to expose gaps in security controls in the digital footprints of third-party vendors. Ratings provide context to benchmark performance over time and against industry peers, and provide assurance to customers, partners, and regulators that an organization is addressing its most pressing security needs.

Businesses today are constantly under the threat of cyberattack. From routine malware to threats like ransomware that can leave an organization scrambling to recover financially and reputationally, cyberattacks threaten profitability, productivity, competitiveness, and business continuity.

To combat threats and mitigate risk, security teams must be able to clearly understand the assets in their digital footprint and the risks associated with them. Teams also need insight into how well security controls are performing, and where there are security performance gaps that must be addressed.

To achieve this level of insight, thousands of organizations around the world rely on the Bitsight Security Ratings platform. Cybersecurity ratings offer a comprehensive, outside-in view of a company’s overall security posture, as well as granular detail about its security performance on essential risk vectors. By continuously monitoring ratings for their company and third-party vendors, security teams can more effectively identify risk, create remediation plans, monitor performance, and improve security posture.

How Bitsight cybersecurity ratings are calculated

Much like credit ratings, Bitsight Security Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820. The higher the score, the stronger the company’s overall security posture. Bitsight cybersecurity ratings are derived from objective, verifiable information and require no data or internal reporting from the rated company. Using information from 120+ sources concerning 25 key risk vectors, Bitsight evaluates the security posture of an organization in 4 essential categories: evidence of compromised systems, diligence of security practices, risky user behavior, and public disclosures of data breaches.

Bitsight cybersecurity ratings offer a single metric that represents an organization’s overall cybersecurity performance. Bitsight also provides grades on specific performance in each of 25 key risk vectors. By providing this level of detail, Bitsight enables security teams to better understand where their security controls are working and where they are not, and what steps can be taken to remediate risk across the digital ecosystem.

How to use Bitsight cybersecurity ratings

Bitsight cybersecurity ratings provide a standardized KPI that organizations can use to continuously monitor, assess, and manage security posture. Bitsight ratings can be used in a variety of ways to strengthen overall security performance.

Continuously monitor performance

Bitsight Security Ratings let security teams move beyond periodic, manual, compliance-based reviews that provide only a point-in-time snapshot of security performance. Because Bitsight cybersecurity ratings are derived from daily scans of company and third party networks, organizations can use them as a continuous picture of cyber performance, facilitating identifying and remediating risk more quickly to align security efforts with a cybersecurity maturity model.

Uncover unknown risk

An expanding digital footprint also means a growing attack surface. Bitsight’s ratings make it easy to identify assets throughout a digital ecosystem and to pinpoint gaps in security controls such as misconfiguration, vulnerabilities, and unpatched systems. Bitsight can also help uncover instances of shadow IT that employees are using without authorization.

Monitor industry benchmarks

Bitsight Security Ratings provide data on hundreds of thousands of global organizations. As a result, security teams can easily benchmark their performance against competitors and peers to provide context into their own rating for company stakeholders.

Visualize concentrations of risk

Bitsight cybersecurity ratings can help reveal concentrated areas of risk across business units, subsidiaries, mergers, acquisitions, and disparate geolocations.

Simplify reporting

Cybersecurity ratings from Bitsight help drive more productive discussions with executives and Board members, especially with individuals who lack exposure to cybersecurity terminology. With Bitsight, security leaders can easily communicate the findings of a security risk assessment with easy-to-understand reports and numbers presented with business context.

Ratings that enable cloud migration

When moving data and infrastructure to the cloud, many organizations assume they must relinquish high-level visibility and control of security. Bitsight cybersecurity ratings provide the tools to monitor and measure risk in cloud services to ensure the proper security controls are in place.

A Bitsight cybersecurity risk assessment can immediately expose risk within the supply chain – including cloud service providers – and reveal details of the most pressing risks impacting the organization and its third-party vendors. Bitsight ratings provide insight into the underlying technology used by third parties and cloud providers, along with context from a highly engaged community of risk and security professionals.

Why choose cybersecurity ratings from Bitsight?

Bitsight is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations as they seek to gain a clear picture of their security posture. Founded in 2011, Bitsight has pioneered the security ratings industry and is the most widely adopted security rating platform in the world. Bitsight’s 3,000 customers include 20% of the world’s countries, 25% of the Fortune 500 companies, 7 of the top 10 cyber insurers, and 4 of the top 5 investment banks.

Bitsight’s success is based in part on the comprehensive visibility it offers into the security posture of organizations and their vendors. Bitsight’s proprietary method of collecting data offers unprecedented visibility into key risk vectors, many of which are unique to Bitsight. Bitsight owns the largest botnet sinkholing infrastructure, delivering greater visibility into compromised systems – a risk that has been correlated to data breaches. Bitsight also offers the ability to view cybersecurity risk assessment reports with 12+ months of historical data, helping companies to identify trends and providing more insight into risks and vulnerabilities.