Why Risk Intelligence is Today’s Top Security Priority

$132.94 billion. That’s the size of the cybersecurity market today. But despite the massive investment in money, time, and expertise, organizations have never been more at risk of an attack.

What’s causing the disconnect? Despite all the effort to ensure security, there is an equally massive and growing effort to exploit vulnerable organizations. Phishing attacks, ransomware, malware and other techniques are big business, generating billions of dollars in losses each year in the US alone.

And while organizations are spending lots of money on lots of tools, they’re still using an outdated, disconnected risk management approach. This creates a reactive, one-dimensional, siloed, and time-intensive process that is no longer appropriate in today’s risk-filled environment.

To keep pace with today’s rising risk, organizations must create and enable a culture of risk intelligence. By leveraging this proactive approach, organizations can create alignment across the entire enterprise, integrate their disparate security tools, and ensure they have the right people, processes, and programs in place to take data-driven action before a vulnerability is exploited, not after.

There are the critical elements to evolving beyond a risk management program to a risk intelligence-informed management program:

An outside-in view: All it takes is one unsecured access point for an external actor to wreak havoc. By understanding how hackers see your organization, you can take the steps necessary to plug any holes and mitigate risk. This includes understanding the risk posed by your third parties so that a cybercriminal can’t use their connection to your systems as a Trojan horse for entry.
An inside-out view: If an outside-in view helps you find the holes in your fence, an inside-out view helps you ensure the gate is locked. Because your enterprise is now widely distributed across remote workers, internet-connected devices, and cloud platforms, it’s critical that you identify and mitigate any internal risk that can lead to data leakage or a credential-based attack.
Cyber risk reporting: The more your board and executives understand the true cyber risk of your organization, the better they can support their security team with the budget, tools, and influence required to make meaningful changes to the security posture.
Outside expertise: No security team can do everything alone. By having an outside forensics team on retainer, you’ll know exactly who to call to augment your capabilities in the critical minutes, hours and days after an attack.
Security organization skills: Cybercriminals are nothing if not innovators, and are always eager to learn the latest tools and processes for exploiting vulnerabilities. Security organizations must prioritize their own education in order to keep up.
Integrated security tools: By bringing disparate security tools together, security teams can gain the full picture of their security posture. This enables better collaboration across security, IT, compliance, and vendor risk management so that you can take decisive action when it counts.

With our Q2 ‘22 Release, we’ve evolved the SecurityScorecard platform and capabilities to enable a proactive, effective, and scalable risk intelligence program. With more than 30 new features, we can help you achieve a true 360º view of risk so that you have the visibility required to move beyond reactive risk management. In addition, we’re able to provide the integrations, training and support required to help you achieve full risk intelligence maturity faster.

Check out our Q2 ‘22 Release Page for full details on everything that’s included in the release, including:

New Outside-In Capabilities: Automatic Vendor Detection (AVD) provides a complete view of your third and fourth-party ecosystem so you can uncover connections, drive targeted discussions, and streamline workflows. Badges let you share your security score so you can provide partners with more confidence in your own security. And Tagging helps you discover risk faster by providing new ways to find the right Scorecards. Additionally, you can now gain access to our Attack Surface Intelligence (ASI) product, which lets you identify and respond to threats faster with the ability to search our data lake.
New Inside-out Capabilities: Evidence Locker 3.0 enhances our existing capabilities by providing an unlimited number of evidence badges, allowing uploads of multiple artifacts of the same evidence type, and letting you prioritize artifacts by importance so your security posture is more digestible.
New Cyber Risk & Resilience Services: Gain deep threat intelligence with our custom Cyber Risk Intelligence as a Service, test your organization’s defenses with active security exercises such as a table top or red team exercise, and leverage our expertise to respond and recover from an attack with our Incident Response team.
New Cyber Risk Reporting Capabilities: The Cyber Risk Quantification module translates your cyber risk into dollars so the board and executives can understand the cost-benefit and ROI of cyber investment options. Our reporting center now features more than 10 reports, including our new Benchmarking and Company Triage reports that can help you better understand where your security posture is relative to competitors and what mitigation measures you should prioritize to improve your standing.
New Marketplace Integrations: By making it easy to integrate SecurityScorecard with Crowdstrike, Palo Alto XSOAR, Rapid Ratings, RiskLens, ThreatConnect, Axio, ServiceNow VRM, Splunk, and OneTrust Third-Party Risk Exchange, you can maximize your investments in all your tools while empowering data-driven workflows.
New Learning: Our SecurityScorecard Academy features several new courses that can help you up-level your self monitoring process, improve your cybersecurity insurance strategies, and improve the working relationship between the CISO and the board.