Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity

Measuring cybersecurity protection for national critical infrastructure

Cybersecurity attacks on critical national infrastructure are growing at an alarming rate. Successful attacks can be devastating, disrupting financial services, utilities, transportation systems, and other essential infrastructure. To counter these threats, many governments and related agencies are seeking methods to better measure, monitor, and investigate the cybersecurity risks of nation states and their critical infrastructure companies.

Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure is a subscription-based security ratings platform that provides insight into detailed key security performance indicators (Cybersecurity KPIs) to enable organizations to easily assess national security. With Bitsight, national security organizations and computer emergency response teams access the information they need to better understand the threats to critical infrastructure cybersecurity and their country’s security performance.

The challenges to critical infrastructure cybersecurity

As digital transformation has made the world more interconnected, cyberattacks have become some of the most common and dangerous types of threats against national security. Attackers aim to gain access to the networks of governments or their trusted, third-party vendors to unleash devastating attacks on an array of critical infrastructure. Cybersecurity attacks may threaten energy systems, nuclear resources, water systems, aviation systems, and food and agriculture systems. Sophisticated attacks may even support espionage, extract high-value intellectual property, and compromise networks to lay a foundation for future exploits.

To combat critical infrastructure cybersecurity threats, nations and government agencies must measure, monitor, and understand the nature of threats as well as the performance of their security programs and controls. Until recently, the task of gathering and processing cyber threat intelligence and monitoring security controls has primarily been a manual process. As a result, governments and agencies often lack visibility into critical infrastructure cybersecurity. As threats continue to develop and spread, organizations charged with protecting national security need a more efficient way to develop the intelligence that can drive security strategy and policy.

Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure

Bitsight is the world’s leading Security Rating Service, transforming the way companies manage information security risk with objective, verifiable, and actionable security ratings.

Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure provides greater visibility and context around the cyber threats confronting nation states. Bitsight ratings detail the cyber threats occurring in a geographic area, providing government stakeholders with a better understanding of trends occurring within their country. Furthermore, government actors can execute searches on threat intelligence at a country-wide level and develop strategic plans to reduce and prevent cybercrime.

With Bitsight, governments can benchmark the security performance of their nation against others and review how key industries in their country perform when compared to industries in other nations. Bitsight ratings are available through a secure portal and an API that enables integration with other platforms.

Bitsight Sovereign Security Ratings are an objective and verifiable measurement of a country’s relative security performance. Updated daily, ratings are based on a broad array of vectors in four classes of externally observable data: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and public disclosures. The higher the rating, the more effective a nation is at implementing good security practices across its networks.

Benefits of Bitsight’s critical infrastructure cybersecurity ratings

By regularly rating critical infrastructure cybersecurity, nations can:

Benchmark national security performance

Bitsight’s unique data and insights enable governments to understand their country’s national cybersecurity performance. With Bitsight for Critical National Infrastructure, governments can benchmark their own security performance against counterparts to understand how key industries perform when compared to other nations. With these insights, governments identify security shortcomings, set realistic targets, create security plans, and reduce cyber risk.

Continuously monitor critical infrastructure cybersecurity

Bitsight delivers actionable and continuous insight into cyber risks threatening a nation. Rather than relying on subjective, outdated datasets, governments leverage Bitsight to continuously and automatically measure, monitor, and learn more about specific cybersecurity risks. Bitsight reveals the prevalence of risks and vulnerabilities within the country, and the specific risks facing critical organizations. Bitsight ratings also issue alerts when the security posture of agencies or nations change or deviate from established risk thresholds.

Inform decision-making with forensic data

Bitsight Sovereign Security Ratings reveal data-driven risk insights so stakeholders make better decisions to improve security postures and address risk. Forensic details and infection data help cybersecurity teams facilitate remediation. Government stakeholders review cybersecurity trends within their nation, execute searches on a country-wide level, and put plans in place to reduce risk and prevent cybercrime.

Why choose Bitsight

Bitsight has pioneered the Security Ratings industry since its founding in 2011. Today, the company is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to provide a clear picture of cybersecurity posture. As the most widely adopted security ratings solution in the world, Bitsight develops actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks by continuously monitoring large volumes of objective and independently verified data.

Today, Bitsight is the choice of 25% of Fortune 500 companies, who rely on Bitsight to enhance cyber resilience, facilitate cyber risk quantification, and improve security posture through continuous controls monitoring. Bitsight customers also include all of the Big 4 accounting firms and four of the top five investment banks, and seven of the top 10 largest cyber insurers.