An Intelligent Way to Monitor and Manage Your Cyber Risks

Cyber risks, especially those emanating from third and fourth parties, are escalating. Successful breaches via the supply chain increased from 44% in 2020 to 61% in 2021, according to Accenture.

Yet gaining a clear picture of these risks is much more complex given interwoven ecosystem dependencies, data sitting in silos, and many organizations’ lack of a security mindset.

“We are so much more digitally dependent today,” said Mike Wilkes, SecurityScorecard advisor. “Even if you have built a fault-tolerant platform and your third parties have built strong cybersecurity programs, maybe one of those third parties is relying on a vendor that hasn’t taken the same precautions. All it takes is one major security event to demonstrate just how fragile our modern, digitally dependent society is.”

The need for a clear view of risk

Whenever a data breach or incident occurs, it increases the pressure on organizations to gain visibility into potential security vulnerabilities throughout their IT stacks. That stress is coming from different directions:

1. Executive leadership. Boards of directors, CEOs, and CFOs have fiduciary responsibility to manage business risks. Yet, they often don’t speak cyber language or understand cyber risks. “We’re seeing security leaders having to spend more time with boards and executive leadership because of the challenges associated with communicating risk to them,” said Bob Bragdon, senior vice president/managing director of CSO worldwide at Foundry. “You need to find a common language so their eyes don’t glass over, while also demonstrating that every security investment is tied to business value.”
2. New regulatory rules. The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving, which makes compliance an ongoing challenge. Most recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated efforts to heighten disclosure of how organizations are managing their cybersecurity risks. In addition, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors has said it will provide U.S. state regulators with access to obtain financial institutions’ cybersecurity ratings. The goal is to monitor cyber health of multistate financial organizations.
3. Individuals increasingly talk with their wallets: 59% of consumers say they’ll avoid companies affected by a cyberattack. Also, by simply adding a Chrome extension, they can automatically view security ratings of the websites they visit. This empowers their ability to evaluate their risk appetite and how much they’re willing to trust brands and sites.

Rapid risk intelligence

A considerable amount of data sits in silos across the enterprise and the supply chain, making it challenging for humans to put together a clear risk profile.

That’s where a risk intelligence platform is a game changer. By automating and scaling repeatable processes throughout the organization — including partners, suppliers, and their vendors — IT and security leaders can:

• Inspect and review existing security and risk status
• Gain insights to remediate vulnerabilities
• Continuously monitor supply chain, as well as third- and fourth-party vendor, risks
• Validate actions taken to remediate gaps or vulnerabilities

An intelligent risk platform like SecurityScorecard offers continuous risk monitoring, actionable threat information, streamlined vendor risk management, automatic vendor detection, and real-time security ratings. These features help organizations understand their attack surface and risk posture, as well as that of third and fourth parties.

“It also puts risk into shared, common language that creates a culture of security,” Bragdon said. “Until we can get people into a security mindset — and we’re still a long way from this — we’ll always be introducing new risks into our environments. That’s why enterprises need trusted providers to bring depth and understanding of cyber risk to the table. That buys credibility with senior leadership.”

Time for a holistic approach

“It used to be companies aimed to be faster than the slowest gazelle,” Wilkes said. “Today, we have to build a collective defense that takes care of the entire herd, not just the slowest gazelle. And that’s our goal at SecurityScorecard: ubiquity, transparency, and quantification of risk.

“And just because you achieve an A security rating, don’t stop,” he added. “The attack surface and the bad guys keep evolving, so you need continuous monitoring with risk intelligence.”

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