RiskIQ vs UpGuard

This guide compares the functions and capabilities of RiskIQ and UpGuard to help you decide which Vendor Risk management solution is best for your business.

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

The usability of a product plays a large part in how quickly you can get up to speed and receive a return on your investment.

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

• RiskIQ: Interface is easy to understand, takes some time to completely master.
• UpGuard: Very intuitive workflow allows new users to master the functions of the platform very quickly. User-friendly workflow also expedites the vendor onboarding process.

“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.

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.

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 the technically literate, we break down the security rating into its underlying parts and provide remediation workflows and suggestions.

In addition, UpGuard uses risk assessments and security questionnaires to provide context into the internal security controls of your organization and its vendors. Solutions like RiskIQ do not offer such real-time attack surface coverage, resulting in new security risks emerging between risk assessments being overlooked.

For reference, security ratings provide a data-driven, instantaneous, and always up-to-date measurement of an organization’s external security posture. According to Gartner,cybersecurity ratings will become as important as credit ratings when assessing the risk of existing and new business relationships…these services will become a precondition for business relationships and part of the standard of due care for providers and procurers of services. Additionally, the services will have expanded their scope to assess other areas, such as cyber insurance, due diligence for M&A, and even as a raw metric for internal security programs.Forrester expects cybersecurity ratings to become a de facto standard in the boardroom by 2025. Investors and traditional debt ratings agencies will include cybersecurity as a risk factor for rating the ability to repay company debt (influenced in part by the cybersecurity ratings market). Learn how UpGuard security ratings work.

• RiskIQ: Focuses on first-party attack surface management and does not provide a real solution for third-party risk management.
• UpGuard: Combines industry-leading risk assessments with a proprietary security rating solution for always up-to-date coverage of third-party risk exposure.

RiskIQ vs. UpGuard: Risk Assessment Methodology

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.

You can’t manage what you don’t know about. 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.
• 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. UpGuard: Scope

Every vendor is a potential data breach attack vector, even the smallest third-party services. In 2013, Target fell victim to a data breach exposing the credit card details and personal information of over 110 million shoppers. This monumental breach was facilitated by network credentials stolen from an HVAC company.

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

• RiskIQ: Primarily focuses on first-party risk rather than taking a holistic view of cybersecurity.
• UpGuard: Capable of discovering security risks deep into the third and fourth-party attack surfaces.

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

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.

• RiskIQ: 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 develop, test, and release software on a continuous basis, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases that are thoroughly tested.

The release model for Recorded Future is unknown.

• RiskIQ: The frequency of RiskIQ’s updates is not stated on the website.
• UpGuard: UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard has a regular fortnightly release rate, with all features, changes, and improvements listed under UpGuard Release Notes.

Cybersecurity is an expensive industry. Vendors often use opaque pricing policies designed to take power away from the purchaser.

With that said, most solutions are priced on a usage basis, either by company size, the number of assets monitored, or modules needed.

RiskIQ does not provide any pricing information on their website. If you’re a small company, you may not be able to afford what seems to be an enterprise pricing strategy.

• 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.
• 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.

While RiskIQ and UpGuard have their platforms, you may want to access resources in a different platform or consolidate statistics into a proprietary centralized dashboard.

In this situation, an API can help. The good news is each provides a standard API.

APIs are great if you have access to technical talent, but not all security and vendor risk management teams do. Without developers, you’re more reliant on the company’s partner ecosystem and third-party integrations.

• RiskIQ: Integrates with Cloudflare, Splunk, Crowdstrike, Qualys, Rapid7, ServiceNow, and more.
• UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Often the proof comes from the customer. RiskIQ and UpGuard have impressive customer lists, and neither is more impressive than the other.

• RiskIQ: Customers include Amazon, Disney, Box, Facebook, McKesson, Toyota, United, Pepsi, Rackspace, DocuSign, and American Express.
• UpGuard: Customers include NASA, the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Morningstar, Akamai, Bill.com, IAG, and ADP. Read our customer case studies here, and our Gartner reviews 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.”

Finally, let’s take a look at how RiskIQ 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.