In this article:
When you keep your Digital Footprint up to date and resolve issues in your Scorecard, especially the most score-impacting ones, you can anticipate how your score will change or view your projected score. But when you see large, unexpected score changes, you may not immediately understand why.
Read about some possible reasons for a significant score swing and what you can do about them:
Your Digital Footprint expands...or gets smaller
If the number of attributed assets in your Digital Footprint increases or decreases, the score can either rise or fall, depending on the finding count and finding impact against the new asset count.
See the following table for how different asset and finding scenarios can affect the score:
| If assets... | and issue findings... | the score is likely to... |
| increase | increase with new assets have generally higher severity and heavier scoring impact |
Drop |
| increase | do not increase significantly with new assets have generally lower severity and lighter scoring impact |
Rise |
| decrease |
retain a relatively higher count in proportion to remaining assets
have generally higher severity and heavier scoring impact |
Drop |
| decrease |
have a relatively lower count in proportion to remaining assets
have generally lower severity and lighter scoring impact |
Rise |
How your Digital Footprint size changes
Your Digital Footprint may change significantly for different reasons:
- A change in our attribution rules could "disqualify" a large number of assets.
- You successfully request removal a large IP range or a domain with many IPs.
- We simply discover more assets as we continually scan the internet.
We discover a breach or significant issues
A breach severely impacts your score. A spike in issue findings, especially those with high severity levels can also cause sharp score drops. Certain factors, have high or high weights, so a concentration of issue findings in these factors can be very impactful:
- Endpoint Security (High)
- IP reputation (High)
- Application Security (Medium)
- Cubit Score (Medium)
- DNS Health (Medium)
- Network Security (Medium)
Note: There are high-severity issues in most score factors.
We perform a score recalibration
While it is necessary to perform recalibrations on a recurring basis, we try to minimize the resulting score impact for most Scorecards. However, certain recalibration changes may be more substantial.
For example, when we start to assign a severity level to a previously informational issue type, your score could drop if you have a number of findings, especially if the new severity level is high.
A recalibration error may also cause a score to rise or fall significantly. We make it a high priority to catch and correct these errors quickly.
Anticipate and respond to big score swings
Take the following actions to prepare for swings and respond quickly when they occur:
- Watch for banners about future scoring updates. We post banners in your Scorecard to tell you when these updates are scheduled to occur and what they entail.
- See our scoring update release notes for additional context about future scoring updates.
- Check your Self-Monitoring Launchpad for Digital Footprint changes or new issue findings.
- Check which of your Scorecard factors have high numbers of findings, especially factors with high and medium weights. Consider addressing issues in those factors as a higher priority.
- Use Score Planner to help you prioritize issue resolution effectively.
- Call our our Professional Services team at 212-222-7061 for help with breaches and other security events.