FICO Enterprise Security Score Gives Long-Term View of Cyber Risk Exposure

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

HIGHLIGHTS:

• FICO^® Enterprise Security Score provides an external rating of a firm's network security.
• The cloud-based service combines a complex assessment of network assets involving billions of data points with predictive analytics to forecast the risk of a material breach event.
• The score is available for enterprises to self-assess, track, and manage their own cybersecurity risks, and is also offered as an important tool in vendor and supply-chain risk management, asset valuation, and breach insurance underwriting.

Analytic software firm FICO today launched the FICO^® Enterprise Security Score, a metric that reveals the likelihood an organization will be breached due to a cyber attack. This score can be used by an enterprise to understand and shore up its defense gaps, and by third parties such as cyber insurance providers, potential partners and customers who need an objective measure of a firm's cyber risk.

More information: http://www.fico.com/en/products/fico-enterprise-security-scoring   

The FICO Enterprise Security Score is an upgrade of the solutions previously offered by QuadMetrics, which FICO acquired in May. FICO upgraded the QuadMetrics analytics with FICO's advanced analytics technologies that power various industry-leading solutions from FICO, including FICO^® Falcon^® Fraud Platform.

The FICO^® Enterprise Security Score performs a complex assessment of network assets, applies advanced predictive algorithms, and then condenses the results down to a three-digit score that rank-orders based on the odds of breach for an organization, allowing an empirical comparison of organizations' cyber security risk. The score represents the likelihood of the enterprise suffering a material breach in the next 12 months. Organizations can use this score to understand and track their own performance, or share it with business partners as an easy-to-understand surrogate for a more in-depth exchange of security posture details. The score comes with current threat profile characteristics and granular insights into potential security issues.

"The need for a standard, empirically derived analytic measure of cybersecurity risk gets stronger every day," said Doug Clare, vice president of cybersecurity solutions at FICO. "There have been attempts to quantify a firm's security posture, but they lack the predictive element, which is FICO's specialty. We aim to bring to cybersecurity the consistency, transparency and predictive power we have brought to credit history in the US through the FICO Score."

The FICO^® Enterprise Security Score is backed by a highly scalable, cloud-based platform that evaluates the entire Internet address space for information to assess the security of any network. This unique asset is updated with billions of data points from around the globe, and enhanced with public and proprietary source information. There is no software or hardware to install, and no integration work to perform.

"To date, cyber insurance underwriting has been challenging, as threats change constantly," said Clare. "Without a clear industry benchmark or standardized risk criteria, insurers have had to rely on a wide range of high-touch methods and judgmental criteria when establishing cyber policies and premiums. The FICO Enterprise Security Score delivers a trusted, empirically derived, long-term view of cyber risk that can improve not only the underwriting process but ongoing portfolio risk assessments."

"Information security professionals actually have a fairly good understanding of the challenges and threats of cybersecurity, but often aren't able to see the cohesive effects of their countermeasures and diligence, affecting both their overall effectiveness and their ability to quantify the risk for their business partners," said CEB Senior Executive Advisor Jason Malo. "Benchmarking at an enterprise level could help complement current metrics and also provide a risk measurement framework for ongoing management and project investment."

"By combining our wide network of data resources with FICO's industry leading advanced  analytics, we've created the most powerful and accurate forecast of a company's cyber risk," said Manish Karir, former CTO of QuadMetrics, and product manager of the Enterprise Security Score. "This score gives chief information security officers details they need to protect their own network assets. It also provides an empirically derived standard benchmark for cyber insurance providers and everyone else in the cybersecurity ecosystem."

"QuadMetrics provided a very unique scoring index, indicating the likelihood of cyber security problems for an organization," said Joe Sawasky, CEO of Merit, a non-profit, Member-owned organization governed by Michigan's public universities that owns and operates America's longest-running regional research and education network. "This proved invaluable to our member organizations in Michigan, given that cyber risk is now among the top business risks overall. The FICO enhancements will make this an even stronger solution, which provides value not only to CIOs but also to CFOs, risk management professionals and boards."

The FICO^® Enterprise Security Score is a complement to FICO^® Falcon^® Cybersecurity Analytics for threat detection.

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 165 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time.

Learn more at www.fico.com.

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