Black Kite vs UpGuard: 2023 Comparison and Review

Mastering the VRM workflow within Black Kite is a challenge. Black Kite users have said that the platform is unintuitive and difficult to navigate, which elevates the learning curve of the solution. 

The UpGuard platform, on the other hand, is well regarded for its ease-of-use and shallow learning curve, which accelerated the implementation of a VRM program.

• Black Kite - Unintuitive user workflow, steep learning curve for first-time users. ‍
• UpGuard - Highly intuitive workflow and shallow learning curve for faster VRM program implementation and even faster vendor onboarding.

"UpGuard has improved the customer experience, reduced vendor onboarding times and introduced an industry-leading security posture, to elevate our customer well above all of its competitors."

- UpGuard customer.

Black Kite bases its third-party risk mitigation strategies on an evaluation of each third-party vendor's security posture, a metric quantified with a security ratings feature known as Cyber Risk Scorecard.

According to Gartner, cybersecurity ratings are becoming as important as credit ratings when it comes to assessing the security risks of potential vendors. However, because security ratings don't reflect the complete context of a vendor's threat landscape, using this feature alone could lead to underlying security risks being overlooked.

To overcome this, UpGuard offers a holistic approach to security posture analysis, combining the real-time measurements of security ratings with the contextualized insights of risk assessments. Together, UpGuard's risk assessments and security ratings offer an excellent overview of each third-party vendor's internal and external security performance.

UpGuard and Black Kite have different methods of representing an organization's calculated security posture:

Black Kite: Provides a risk rating from A to F, like a report card.

UpGuard: Provides a FICO-like score between 0 and 950 along with the following letter grades, A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can see how tt

To see an example of an application of UpGuard's rating system, request a free security score for your organization.

Black Kite vs. UpGuard: Risk Assessment Methodology

UpGuard and Black Kite use different risk assessment methodologies to assess the potential risk of an IT vendor.

Black Kite bases its Cyber Risk ratings on ten risk categories and 250+ control items. It gathers data through open-source intelligence tools and techniques hackers use, like data collectors, crawlers, honeypots, as well as continuous scanning of databases, reputation sites, cyber events, hacker shares, and public vulnerability databases like CVE.

However, Black Kite's list of security risk categories discovered in scans includes items of questionable accuracy, which calls into question the reliability of its risk calculation methods. 

Including ambiguous risks in security reports burden security teams with unnecessary investigation efforts, making the risk management process more complex and cumbersome rather than streamlined and efficient.

UpGuard's security rating feature evaluates security postures based on 70+ critical attack vector categories. In addition to risk assessments contextualizing each vendor's threat landscape, 

UpGuard also offers real-time critical risk monitoring capabilities, such as data leak detection and identify breach detection, for the most comprehensive and accurate analysis of each vendor's cybersecurity risk profile. The reliable vendor risk data generated from UpGuard's holistic approach to third-party risk detection creates a foundation for a scalable and efficient Vendor Risk Management program.

Black Kite: Based on ten risk categories and 250+ control items

UpGuard: Augments point-in-time risk assessments with security ratings to ensure information is always up-to-date. Our security ratings algorithm runs hundreds of individual checks, including email security and email spoofing risks (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), website network security (SSL, HSTS, header exposure), phishing and malware risk, explicit checks for 200 services across thousands of ports (mail, app, user auth, file sharing, voice, administration, database, unidentified, and open ports), domain hijacking risk (DNSSEC and domain registry issues), reputational risks (CEO rating and employee rating), credential management (exposure to known data breaches and data leaks detected by our data leak detection engine). We give each identified issue a risk prioritization category to help you address the most critical risk first.

Black Kite vs. UpGuard: Scope

Every third-party vendor is a potential attack vector, even those with little to no access to sensitive data. Adopting a Vendor Risk Management solution with limited scope will overlook third-party attack vectors increasing your risk of suffering a data breach.

As such, an ideal Vendor Risk Management solution should be capable of monitoring all the vendors in your third-party network, no matter how extensive that network is. 

Black Kite: Unknown

UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily, and customers can automatically add new vendors

The predictive capabilities of Black Kite and UpGuard differ quite extensively:

Black Kite: Performs non-intrusive checks, including passive DNS, attack surface detection, passive vulnerability scanning, DNS health, SSL/TLS strength, and email security, as well as asset reputation, credential compromises, hacktivist shares, social media monitoring, dark web search, cloud delivery network security, fraudulent apps, and DDoS detection. They do not, however, provide absolute transparency into the efficacy of these checks.
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UpGuard: UpGuard continuously scans for critical breach vectors, including phishing susceptibility, man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, DNS issues, and more. Using its advanced attack surface scanning solution, UpGuard detected data exposed in a GitHub repository by an AWS engineer in 30 minutes. This exposure was reported to AWS, and the repo was secured the same day. This repo contained personal identity documents and system credentials, including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys. We can do this because we actively discover exposed datasets on the open and deep web, scouring open S3 buckets, public Github Repos, and unsecured RSync and FTP servers. Our data leak discovery engine continuously searches for keyword lists provided by our customers. The effectiveness of UpGuard's breach prevention methodology is evident through the scope of breaches and data leaks UpGuard has discovered and reported to the world in the New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Forbes, and TechCrunch.

Both Black Kite and UpGuard invest in the ongoing development of the cybersecurity community through a steady stream of blog content. 

UpGuard's blog content, however, is reviewed by industry experts to verify trustworthiness. UpGuard's VRM blog content has also been regarded as more in-depth and helpful. In addition to its VRM blog, UpGuard regularly hosts a virtual summit to keep the global cybersecurity community updated with the latest VRM developments.

‍Black Kite: Company and product blog.‍

UpGuard: UpGuard keeps the VRM community continuously updated with the latest industry developments through its blog content and quarterly summit event.

UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to continuously develop, test, and release software, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard's regularly updated product release notes make these releases available to the public.

On the other hand, Black Kite doesn't seem to have a public notification stream solely devoted to product releases.

UpGuard is upfront and transparent with its pricing to help prospects gauge financial suitability before booking e demo call.

We were not able to find any information about Black Kite's pricing. High costs can price out small to medium-size businesses and relegate large companies to managing only their most at-risk vendors.

Black Kite: Public pricing information is not available.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a transparent pricing model which you can view here. UpGuard pricing starts at $5k/year and scales with your company. If you have any questions, please let us know via sales@upguard.com and we will follow up.

UpGuard and Black Kite offer standard APIs for seamless communication with other internal systems.

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Both UpGuard and Black Kite integrate with third-party services to streamline Vendor Risk Management. UpGuard, however, also supports connections with over 4,000+ apps through its Zapier integration.

Black Kite: Integrates with Supply Wisdom and VendorInsight.

UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

The best proof of the superiority of a solution comes directly from its customers. White Black Kite services many known brands, UpGuard's customer base includes more distinguished companies.

Black Kite: Customers include Polk & Wardwell, LLP, a Fortune 500 retailer, and an OTC financial institution.

UpGuard: Customers include the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Pagerduty, TDK, IAG, and Tech Mahindra. 

‍Read UpGuard's customer case studies here.

Here's what a few UpGuard customers had to say about their experience. You can read more on Gartner reviews.

"UpGuard has given us a view of our vendor security posture. The ability to launch a questionnaire or ask for a plan of remediation for items that show as vulnerable is also a great added value and a time saver. UpGuard is also very customer-focused. They respond quickly to issues and questions and welcome any input that could improve the product. Overall it is one of the best value add tools we have."

"The simplicity of the product is fantastic. My team and I were able to be up and running in minutes. We monitor risks on over 25 vendors in near real-time and use these statistics to report to the C suite and Board of Directors. UpGuard has become part of the critical cybersecurity metrics that we monitor and report upon."

"The ease of use and simplicity of the product is excellent. We were able to be up and running with 50 vendors within minutes, not hours. The reporting is used for monthly statistics and is reported to our Senior Management. UpGuard has become an integral part of our critical cybersecurity metrics that we monitor and report upon."

Let's take a look at how Black Kite and UpGuard compare when assessed with the security rating solution on UpGuard's platform on July 28, 2020. It's important to note that UpGuard adheres to the Principles of Fair and Accurate Security Ratings, removing all biases in this analysis.

• Accuracy and Validation: UpGuard's security ratings are empirical, data-driven, and based on independently verifiable and accessible information.
• Model Governance: The datasets and methodologies used to calculate our security ratings can change in line with our improving understanding of cybersecurity risk mitigation. When this happens, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about the impact on their security rating.
• Independence: No commercial agreement or lack thereof allows an organization to improve its security rating outside of the unbiased measurements of UpGuard's security ratings.‍
• Confidentiality: Any information disclosed to UpGuard during a challenged rating or dispute is appropriately protected. Nor do we provide third parties with sensitive or confidential information on rated organizations that could lead to system compromise.