Do you know where your security performance gaps are?
Your digital footprint is expanding – which means you have a lot more technology and data to keep track of and to secure. Fortunately, you have lots of tools to do that – from perimeter firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS), to endpoint security and SIEM systems for analyzing and responding to threats.
However, because no security system is completely foolproof, there are bound to be gaps in your existing security controls. From open ports to missing patches, these security performance gaps leave you open to attacks like ransomware that exploit vulnerabilities to install malicious software on a system.
Visibility is the key to identifying and remediating security performance gaps. To understand what’s going on in your digital ecosystem and where your cybersecurity risk is concentrated, you need a way to gain comprehensive visibility into your attack surface.
Bitsight can help. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform enables you to visualize your environment, improve cyber hygiene, identify security performance gaps, and take swift action to remediate problems.
Where to look for security performance gaps
Security performance gaps can occur anywhere in your IT environment, including:
On-premises infrastructure
Teams can potentially overlook on-premises assets when it comes to patching, updates, and configuration – opening them up to known vulnerabilities.
Endpoints
User’s endpoints are often the weakest link in the security chain. From malware to spam propagation and filesharing, your users are doing a lot on these devices you may not be aware of.
SIEMs
Your SIEM logs everything that’s happening in your network. But without the vital context you need to understand the raw data, there may be performance gaps you’re not seeing.
Firewall
Your firewall defends your perimeter. But when so much of your business happens outside the network—including shadow IT—it may not be catching every threat entering or leaving your IT environment.
Cloud infrastructure Every cloud instance must be properly configured, managed, and monitored according to a shared responsibility model. Without clear visibility into your cloud assets, it’s hard to know if everything is properly configured and secured. Shadow IT Cloud services make it easy to spin up new instances or web services. Many of these may not be on your radar—and may be putting your organization at risk of breach. Digital footprint From forgotten domains and old URLs to rogue IP addresses, your digital footprint is likely a lot larger than you think. Digital assets you’re unaware of can represent security performance gaps.
Closing security performance gaps with Bitsight
Bitsight offers an industry-leading Security Ratings platform that delivers instant visibility into your attack surface and any security performance gaps within it. Bitsight bases security ratings on independent, objective information and offers a data-driven measurement of an organization’s security performance. Much like credit ratings, Bitsight Security Ratings are an outside-in view of performance generated through externally observable data.
To deliver greater visibility, Bitsight continuously measures performance and issues daily ratings and alerts. Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the rating, the stronger the organization’s security posture. Ratings are based on 23 risk vectors across four areas of security: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches.
In addition to overall security performance, Bitsight Security Ratings illuminate security performance gaps in specific areas of an IT environment. For example, the Bitsight platform evaluates open ports to determine whether or not unnecessary access points exist. And, Bitsight analyzes security configurations such as SSL, SPF, DKIM, and DNSSEC to measure a company’s effectiveness in implementing these controls.
In addition to identifying security performance gaps, Bitsight Security Ratings help mitigate third-party risk, improve cloud security posture management, and conform with the guidelines of a cybersecurity maturity model such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, part of the Bitsight Security Ratings platform, provides deep visibility into an increasingly complex attack surface. IT teams get a handle on the security performance gaps and risk hidden across digital assets in the cloud, geographies, subsidiaries, and your remote workforce. Specifically, Bitsight Security Ratings helps you:
Visualize digital assets
Bitsight’s centralized dashboard shows the location of each digital asset broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit. The dashboard also reveals the risk associated with each asset, helping to accelerate remediation.
Uncover shadow IT
Bitsight can help security teams uncover hidden assets and cloud instances, assess them for risk, and bring them in line with corporate security policies.
Identify concentrated risk
With an ecosystem-wide view of your digital footprint, teams visualize areas of excessive risk, determine areas of highest exposure, and prioritize remediation of the most critical security performance gaps.
Why customers love Bitsight
Bitsight was founded in 2011 and is the world’s leading Security Rating service for managing security performance and third-party risk. Seven of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies, and 20 percent of the world’s governments rely on Bitsight to manage cyber risk.
Greater visibility
Bitsight’s proprietary method of collecting data from 120+ sources delivers unprecedented visibility into key risk vectors, many of which are completely unique to Bitsight.
Prioritization of risk vectors
Bitsight uses only the most critical risk vectors in its Security Ratings, and importance of these vectors is calculated in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets are ranked higher.
An engaged community
The Bitsight platform is the site of the most robust community of cyber risk professionals in the industry. Bitsight customers share security ratings with more than 170,000 third-party organizations, making Bitsight the most widely used security ratings platform across all industries.