RiskIQ vs Bitsight

Cyber attacks, misconfiguration, data leaks, and data breaches are increasingly common. Each week the news is full of new exposures of protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII).

These security incidents are not only more common but also more costly. The average cost of a data breach is now nearly $4 million globally. For breaches involving third-parties, the cost increases to $4.29 million according to a recent report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute.

Every organization must invest in tools to prevent data breaches and reduce cybersecurity risk: particularly risks stemming from third and fourth-parties.

Cyber risk management and Vendor Risk Management are top priorities for senior management and increasingly, at the board level.

Outside of financial costs, breaches impose significant regulatory and reputational costs due to new general data protection laws. As many of these laws have introduced or widened the scope of mandatory data breach notification laws.

In the United States, California has introduced CCPA, Florida has introduced FIPA, and New York has launched the SHIELD Act. Every state, territory, and country have turned their attention to protecting the PII and PHI of its citizens.

The compounding factor is these laws have broadened the definition of sensitive data. What were once small security incidents are now reportable data branches, increasing the impact of inadequate digital risk management.

While it started with the European Union’s GDPR in 2018, countries like Brazil are following suit with LGPD.

It’s safe to say, security teams have more to worry about than ever before. The job is now not only about developing information security policies and improving security postures. Increasingly, you are expected to translate technical details into terms non-technical stakeholders understand.

The good news is there are tools that can help, such as UpGuard, the issue is there are now so many tools that it’s hard to decide on which one to pick.

We wrote this guide with all this in mind, to give you a clear comparison between RiskIQ, BitSight, and UpGuard, so you can make an informed decision and choose the tool that is right for you.

RiskIQ Overview

RiskIQ is a cybersecurity company based in San Francisco, California. RiskIQ provides cloud-based software as a service for organizations to manage their attack surface and detect phishing, fraud, malware, and other online security threats.

RiskIQ was founded in 2009 by Lou Manousos, Chris Kiernan, and David Pon.

RiskIQ UI. Source: riskiq.com

BitSight Overview

BitSight Technologies is a Cambridge, MA-based company that aims to quantify the external cybersecurity posture of organizations using publicly accessible data.

BitSight’s security ratings are used by security and cybersecurity riskprofessionals to conduct due diligence research for vendor risk management programs, private equity, M&A activities, and more.

Additionally, these security ratings are used for attack surface analytics, industry benchmarking, and the assessment of fourth-party risk.

BitSight UI. Source: bitsight.com

Minimizing the amount of time and effort in learning to use a new solution is a critical aspect of delivering on any value proposition.

RiskIQ, BitSight, and UpGuard offer their services via SaaS and are accessible from web-based platforms that can help users monitor and manage vendor risks.

RiskIQ: Its threat intelligence tool maps internet-facing assets and provides insights and prioritized remediation recommendations based on asset criticality, context, and threat severity.

BitSight: Provides views of identified vendor risks enabling detailed reporting of vendors.

UpGuard: High-level summation of risk with the ability to drill down into precise technical details. Each risk is prioritized based on extensive research conducted by the in-house security team, and where possible remediation and protection suggestions are provided.

RiskIQ’s platform provides insight and automation needed to map and monitor your organization’s internet-exposed digital attack surface, understand and mitigate exposures, and expedite external threat investigation.

RiskIQ’s threat detection and asset management platform finds known assets like your corporate website, microsites, and any other public-facing internet assets, unknown assets like third-party JavaScript resources, and rogue or malicious assets like typosquatted domains and abandoned servers.

BitSight provides security ratings that aggregate different risks into a single score that allows for immediate and easy comparison of different organizations, third-party vendors, and service providers.

Like RiskIQ, UpGuard’s platform monitors your internet footprint to provide insights into your digital attack surface, vulnerabilities, and external security posture. The difference is that UpGuard can also monitor your third-parties’ security posture providing you with a holistic view of your organization’s security risk.

We then take this analysis and group it into an easily understandable security rating that allows anyone to understand the risk of a particular asset or vendor. For security operations and threat management teams, the security rating can break down into its underlying parts which can be used as part of remediation workflows.

In addition, UpGuard uses risk assessments and security questionnaires to provide context into the internal security controls of your organization and its vendors. These more manual solutions provide valuable information that can be missed by endpoint security or attack surface management solutions like RiskIQ.

For reference, security ratings provide a data-driven, instantaneous, and always up-to-date measurement of an organization’s external security posture.

Each service relies on its own proprietary risk assessment methodology to assess the potential risk.

While RiskIQ is useful for assessing your own attack surface and may be sufficient to complete other assessment techniques when evaluating first-party risk, it has real limitations when applied to improving your organization’s complete security posture.

BitSight relies on IP reputation which attempts to attribute malware traffic based on IP addresses. We’ve outlined in detail why we believe IP attribution isn’t a complete solution for your third-party risk program.

At UpGuard, we believe an accurate and up to date inventory of you and your vendors’ public-facing digital assets is a must for any cybersecurity program. It’s no longer enough to only manage your own security posture. You need to know that your vendors are keeping the data you provide them safe too.

That’s why UpGuard takes a standardized approach to security assessment across first and third-party risks by using a combination of security ratings, self-assessments, and vendor assessments against recognized security frameworks.

Additionally, we’ve introduced a secure way for organizations to make the results of these security assessments easily shareable to save time, resources, and to increase trust in the supply chain.

The standardization of security assessment practices against recognized security frameworks, and making the results easily shareable helps all businesses save time, resources, and increases trust in the supply chain.

With UpGuard, you and your vendors can publish your security rating, completed security assessments, and supporting documentation directly on the platform.

Additionally, UpGuard’s platform provides real-time risk monitoring capabilities, integrated vendor processes, and data leak detection to provide businesses with a complete solution.

• RiskIQ: Primarily focuses on first-party attack surface management and first-party external threats like social media impersonation and phishing, which is only one of the many ways that an organization can suffer from a data breach, cyber-attack, or data leak.
• BitSight: Relies primarily on IP reputation.
• UpGuard: UpGuard assesses first, third, and fourth-parties and 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 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, so you know what to focus on first.

RiskIQ vs. BitSight: Scope

Your assets are only one of the ways that your organization can be exposed. As we saw with Target, even a non-technical vendor like an HVAC provider can lead to the exposure of more than 110 million consumers’ credit card and personal data.

RiskIQ only focuses on your public-facing digital assets and ignores the risks that vendors pose.

Not every solution provides the same level of coverage. If your organization employs small specialist vendors, ensure the solution covers them. As you know, it is best practice to monitor any vendor that handles sensitive data continuously.

• RiskIQ: Primarily focuses on first-party risk rather than taking a holistic view of cybersecurity.
• BitSight: 170,000 supported organizations
• UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily, and customers can automatically add new domains or vendors.

Keeping informed on product updates and the latest cyber security developments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and cyber threatsemerging daily.

Customers need up-to-date resources and relevant insights to stay ahead of the curve and protect their organizations from emerging cyber risks.

The frequency of publication and presence of community engagement is a key indicator of a company’s mission, focus, and investment in its users.

RiskIQ, BitSight, and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate and inform customers.

RiskIQ: Company and product blog.

BitSight: BitSight maintains regular blog posts and webinars covering security incidents, feature updates, and industry developments.

These efforts, along with an extensive network of partnerships, provide the resources security professionals need to identify the best security practices for their program.

UpGuard: UpGuard Summit brings together a community of security leaders from leading companies, explores the future of security, and helps businesses stay secure.

The UpGuard cybersecurity and risk management blog is updated four times a week and the breach research blog has uncovered and secured some of the largest data breaches.

UpGuard’s free weekly Breach Newsletter informs 20,000+ subscribers of the latest global data breaches.

Technology is always changing. New vulnerabilities are added to CVE on a daily basis, and attackers are constantly finding new zero-day exploits.

The speed at which a security platform can incorporate changes determines how well it can respond to new threats and customer requests.

Additionally, they should continue to update, adjust, and improve their threat detection methodology to reflect changes to the threat landscape.

RiskIQ:

BitSight: BitSight does not publicly disclose product release cycle periods but does provide overviews of significant platform updates via their corporate blog.

UpGuard: UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard has a regular release rate every two weeks, with all features, changes, and improvements listed under UpGuard Release Notes.

Cyber risk platforms can be expensive and the common use of opaque pricing policies often takes power away from the purchaser. With most services offering tiered licensing options and add-ons, finding a solution that fits your needs and budget can prove more difficult without transparent pricing.

RiskIQ: Rumored to start at $35 per 1,000 analyzed pages per year or $150,000 per analyzed brand plus cumulative consumer downloads per year for mobile products.

BitSight: Public pricing information is not directly available, but prices are reported to be around $2000-$2500 per vendor per year.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a fully transparent and publicly accessible pricing model which you can view here. If you have any questions, please email sales@upguard.com.

Accessing the information in a cyber risk product outside of its graphical interface is important for integrated business strategies and consolidating data to a preferred system.

RiskIQ, BitSight, and UpGuard offer APIs.

RiskIQ:

BitSight: BitSight offers the ability for customers to extend security ratings through a Developer API.

UpGuard: Offers a standard API to pull data from UpGuard’s platform into other enterprise applications.

RiskIQ: Integrates with Cloudflare, Splunk, Crowdstrike, Qualys, Rapid7, ServiceNow, and more.

BitSight: Customers include The University of North Florida, Snam, and PROSA.

UpGuard: Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, McAfee.

RiskIQ: Customers include Amazon, Disney, Box, Facebook, McKesson, Toyota, United, Pepsi, Rackspace, DocuSign, and American Express.

BitSight: Customers include Optus / Singtel, The University of North Florida, Snam, and PROSA.

UpGuard: Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, McAfee.

RiskIQ: Focuses on first-party attack surface management and does not provide a real solution for third-party risk management.

BitSight: BitSight Security Ratings range on a scale of 250-900 with higher ratings indicating better security performance.

UpGuard: Security rating scale of 0-950, ranked as A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can request your free security rating by clicking here.