Cyber risk management company Bitsight Technologies Inc. and credit ratings and research firm Moody’s Corp. today announced the launch of a new joint product that aims to strengthen market context for better-informed decisions.

Called “Implied Cyber Threat,” the new service is built on Bitsight’s cyber risk analytics engine and Moody’s Orbis company database to provide cyber risk insights and market context for more than 325 million organizations worldwide. The organizational coverage is claimed to be the highest in the market by a multiple of 25 times.

The product seeks to address the issue that as losses from cyber events continue to climb, cyber risk has become a primary consideration beyond the enterprise security suite. Bitsight and Moody’s argue that organizations need cyber risk insights into all third parties they do business with, which is where ICT steps in with analytics that facilitate a unified, comparable assessment of the risks organizations face.

ICT quantifies cyber risk for an organization based on Moody’s firmographic indicators, including company size, sector and georgraphy, along with a subset of Bitsight’s risk vectors including botnet infections and open ports. The end result is a highly actionable inherent risk indicator with a significant correlation to breach and ransomware data.

Third-party companies identified by ICT as having a very high risk were found to be nearly eleven times more likely to experience a security incident compared to very low-risk entities as scored by the offering. ICT can act as a standalone indicator of relative cyber risk as well as a contextual complement to Bitsight’s performance analytics.

“Cyberattacks and ransomware cost companies billions in losses every year, jeopardizing global business stability and making cyber risk management a top priority for business leaders,” said Moody’s Managing Director Matt McDonald. “The ICT will help our customers assess their third-party cyber risks. The scale of the ICT is a major advancement that will help provide actionable cyber risk insight into extended business ecosystems.”

Bitsight Chief Risk Officer Derek Vadala added that “by bringing together Bitsight cyber analytics with Moody’s leading company information, the market now has a powerful mechanism for assessing cyber risk at scale.”

Bitsight is a venture capital-backed startup, having raised $398 million, according to Tracxn, including a round of $250 million in 2021. The round in 2021 came entirely from Moody’s.

Image: Bitsight