UPDATED 12:46 EDT / JUNE 23 2016

NEWS

SecurityScorecard’s security grading service attracts $20M from Alphabet and friends

Modern threat detection tools with machine learning technology under the hood can pick up on even the most subtle signs of malicious activity. But sometimes, a higher level view is needed to effectively identify vulnerabilities, which is where SecurityScorecard Inc. enters the picture. The startup has developed a service for surveying network weaknesses that attracted a $20 million investment today from a group of backers led by GV, Alphabet Inc.’s venture capital arm.

The platform can automatically rate an organization’s security based on ten criteria that pertain mainly to internal network protection operations. SecurityScorecard looks for unpatched and misconfigured workloads, checks how fast the IT department reacts to such issues and assesses the security of user endpoints. The findings are then combined with information from a proprietary threat intelligence feed that the startup has created to track threats to its clients. The outfit monitors everything from new entries in the Department of Homeland Security’s online exploit database to chatter on hacker boards about future attack plans.

Administrators can employ the information to improve their company’s security posture while using the service’s automatically-generated score as a sort of yardstick. And SecurityScorecard provides the ability to grade other organizations as well, which is useful in a number of ways. First, the feature lets CIOs check how their network protection teams match up against industry peers to identify opportunities for improvement. And second, it can be used to perform vendor assessments. The service lists suppliers in a dashboard that is organized according to various risk factors and gets refreshed regularly based on new data from the startup’s feed.

SecurityScorecard currently tracks some 100,000 companies, a number that its founders hope to grow considerably using today’s funding. Chief executive Aleksandr Yampolskiy also has plans to develop new detection features and start targeting international markets. The outfit’s service is already used by more than 100 organizations around the world, including many from the Fortune 500.

Image via Pixabay

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