One of the biggest challenges to organizations is cybersecurity spending. As many of our loyal readers know from our past reporting – a determined hacker can always get into a system.

There are however layers of security an organization can put in place to hopefully ensure the hacker gives up and moves on.

On any given day a company can be faced with, DDoS threats, phishing, social engineering/spear-phishing and so much more.

Even worse – these threats come from amateurs, hacker entrepreneurs, organized crime, terrorist groups and nation-states.

CSOs have to protect the organization while justifying spend.

This is where tools which score come in. In fact, they are essential.

There is no foolproof tool mind you – at this point, a number of companies score an organization’s security. The point is that a score is better than no score.

Every organization should have a sense of how their cybersecurity posture ranks – compared to other organizations and their peers. By peer, we are talking about companies in the same geographic area, company size and industry. In addition, we would also group companies which are customer-facing.

For example, those which take a large number of credit cards.

NIST suggests organizations work with peers to ensure you know what they are dealing with. It is likely what they see will be coming to you in the future.

The point is hackers are smart enough to go after vulnerabilities in related industries.

This is why you want to have the best cybersecurity posture in your space.

To help, RiskSense just introduced Full Spectrum RBVM (Risk-based Vulnerability Management) that automatically discovers, analyzes, scores, and prioritizes both internal and external-facing security threat exposure across an organization’s IT infrastructure and applications. The cloud-delivered RiskSense solution now combines RBVM with RiskSense SRS (Security Rating Service) to provide 360-degree visibility that eliminates security gaps and enables security teams to measure, prioritize, and control both inside-out and outside-in risks from one integrated console.

Last December we reported on the company’s cybersecurity predictions for 2020. These predictions have proven to be accurate so far – especially their first one… Ransomware. This problem has gotten far worse thanks to the Covid-19 Coronavirus which has forced employers to send workers home to work on computers that don’t have the same security protections as those in the office. Moreover, they can be shared by others in the household who do not have cybersecurity education.

“In our opinion, there are two unique features of the RiskSense platform for IT management,” said Dr. Alea Fairchild, Director, Constantia Institute. “The first is its ability to contextualize the threat landscape to highlight priorities and position the current security posture of the company. And the other is to compare the situation of the company to others in its industry to benchmark within the industry domain how effectively their cybersecurity efforts have been deployed. It puts the security team in more of an offensive (vs. defensive) mode towards its cybersecurity efforts and outcomes.”

The new RiskSense SRS capabilities, which are fully integrated with the RiskSense platform, require nothing more than a second-level domain name (yourcompany.com, for example) to start performing a continuous, independent, quantitative discovery and analysis of all internet-accessible assets. It generates an external RiskSense Security Score, or xRS3, across key security components including network security, application security, patching cadence, email security, DNS security, and IP reputation. A benchmarking comparison is also provided, which allows organizations to compare their cybersecurity posture against those of industry peers.

“By providing an ‘outside-in’ perspective into an organization’s cybersecurity posture, RiskSense SRS extends our existing ‘inside-out’ approach to vulnerability management and remediation prioritization,” said Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala, CEO of RiskSense. “SRS provides a quantified ‘hacker’s view’, that automatically discovers threats in internet-facing infrastructure including undocumented and misconfigured systems, externally accessible databases, as well as exposed cloud, container, and SaaS apps.”

Each xRS3 score takes into account observed security best practices, past incidents, security weaknesses on externally-accessible assets, information leakage, and activity on the Dark Web to reflect an organization’s overall security stance. These scores facilitate initial benchmarking and ongoing measurement, meaningful prioritization of vulnerabilities and prioritized remediation activities, as well as a comparison with industry peers. The RiskSense platform helps users quickly orchestrate remediation actions; asset grouping, ticket assignment, details and workflows for handling risk acceptance, false positives, and validation options that track the corrective actions and measurements to confidently know when vulnerabilities have been successfully resolved.

Risk scoring is a competitive space but tens of millions of companies still haven’t performed such analysis and they still need education on why this is important for them to do. Hopefully, the increased activity by vendors means companies will learn that the only way to be sure they are cyber secure is to benchmark against other, similar organizations with the goal being to lead the pack.

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