The issue of cybersecurity has come under great scrutiny by South Africans at large, as company after company has fallen victim to some form of a data breach.
In June, local traffic fines website viewfines.co.za experienced a breach that affected almost 1 million South Africans, the website is still offline as a result.
On an even larger scale, over 60 million South African ID’s were exposed on a real estate server around October 2017. And recently it has also emerged that financial services provider, Liberty Holdings was attacked by hackers who have found a loophole on their site.
This is a clear sign that South Africa in general, needs to take a serious look at its approach to cybersecurity.
Looking at solutions:
FICO is offering free subscriptions to FICO Enterprise Security Score Portrait, a machine learning-based cybersecurity rating service. The analytics firm that the program is available, free of charge, to all organisations worldwide.
This offer demonstrates a commitment to advancing cybersecurity awareness and effectiveness around the globe.
With this complimentary subscription, organisations can learn how business partners and cyber insurance underwriters see their network security.
In addition, Chief Risk Officers can now quantify the risk stemming from lax network maintenance and user behaviours that increase the likelihood of suffering a large-scale data breach.
“There’s a lot of buzz about cybersecurity ratings, but most businesses don’t understand how they work or know how they rank,” said Doug Clare, vice president of cybersecurity solutions at FICO.
“Now any company can vet the accuracy of their score before they’re unknowingly assessed by other organizations in their supply chain. As insurers begin using these scores in pricing cybersecurity insurance and as organizations start using ratings to vet supply chain and partner risk, businesses will need to vet the details used to assess their security posture — just as consumers check their FICO Score before applying for loans.”
The free subscription enables organisations to curate the assets upon which their score is based, tagging the correct assets and removing assets that are not connected to their network. This provides transparency, enables fair assessment, and improves accuracy in the security scoring process.
“Organisations need to trust that their score is based on accurate data,” Clare said. “With this free program, FICO aims to bring total transparency and self-service asset curation to the process of cybersecurity risk assessment.”
The program is based on billions of cyber risk indicators that are monitored at internet scale.
It relies on machine learning to interpret the network hygiene practices of thousands of previously breached organisations and form predictors that amplify the behaviours and signals proven to increase the risk of data loss.
Organisations subscribing to the program can view their own three-digit score, on a scale of 300 – 850, and use it to understand and track their own performance. The score can also be shared with business partners as an easy-to-understand surrogate for a more in-depth exchange of security posture details.
FICO was part of a consortium of industry leaders that worked with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to develop new guiding principles for cybersecurity ratings.
Edited by Neo Sesinye
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