Why are there unexpected Score changes in a Scorecard?

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 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:

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 issue types, have high or high weights, so a concentration of high-severity issue findings can be very impactful.

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 that contain several issue types 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.