The comparison tool lets you view the security health of up to 10 companies side by side. Use it to quickly identify differences in scores, factor grades, and active issues across vendors, subsidiaries, or industry peers you're monitoring. This view is especially useful when you're evaluating vendors during a procurement decision, tracking a group of subsidiaries after an acquisition, or benchmarking your own organization against competitors.
How to open the comparison tool
There are two ways to open the comparison tool, and each method populates the comparison with a different set of companies. Choose the method that matches what you want to compare.
From the Reporting Center
Opening the tool from the Reporting Center automatically populates the report with your top 10 industry competitors (peer scorecards in the same industry). Use this method when you want a quick benchmark against your peer group without selecting companies manually.
- Go to Automation > Reporting Center.
- Select the Comparison report.
From a portfolio
You can manually select which companies to compare from a portfolio. Use this method when you want to compare a specific set of companies rather than your automatically generated peer group, such as a shortlist of vendors under review or a group of subsidiaries.
- Go to a portfolio and find the companies you want to compare.
- Select up to 10 companies by checking the box next to each one.
- Click Compare in the toolbar that appears above the list.
Adding and changing companies
Once the comparison tool is open, you can add or swap companies by selecting Manage Comparison. You can either browse companies from a portfolio you have access to or search across all rated scorecards by name or domain. The tool supports up to 10 companies at a time, so removing a company frees a slot for a new one.
What the comparison tool shows
The comparison tool organizes results into the following sections.
Grades
This section gives you a high-level risk snapshot for each company.
- Overall Score: The company's overall security rating (A–F) and numeric score. This is the same score you see on their scorecard.
- Ransomware Score: How susceptible the company is to a ransomware attack, based on the security signals SecurityScorecard observes.
- Breach Susceptibility Indicator: An estimate of how likely the company is to experience a data breach, shown as a visual scale from low to very high.
- Business Impact: An estimate of how severe the consequences would be if the company experienced a security incident (for example, Low, Medium, or Critical).
Score factors
Score factors break the overall grade down into the ten specific risk categories that make up a company's score. Each factor is shown as its own letter grade, so you can see exactly where a company is strong or falling behind rather than just its overall average. The factors included are:
- Network Security
- DNS Health
- Patching Cadence
- Endpoint Security
- IP Reputation
- Application Security
- Cubit Score
- Hacker Chatter
- Information Leak
- Social Engineering
Other factors
This section highlights two additional risk signals that don't fit neatly into a single grade: Exposed Services is the number of exposed network services detected across a company's infrastructure, and Exposed Vulnerabilities Seen is the number of known vulnerabilities observed on the company's assets.
The Exposed Services category ncludes the following issue types:
| service_cassandra | service_couchdb | service_dns |
| service_elasticsearch | service_ftp | service_http_proxy |
| service_imap | service_ldap | service_ldap_anonymous |
| service_microsoft_sql | service_mongodb | service_mysql |
| service_neo4j | service_netbus_remote_access | service_networking |
| service_open_vpn | service_oracle_db | service_oracle_registry |
| service_pop3 | service_pptp | service_postgresql |
| service_pulse_vpn | service_rdp | service_redis |
| service_smb | service_soap | service_socks_proxy |
| service_telnet | service_vnc | service_rsync |
Issues detected
Issues are grouped by severity — high, medium, and low — and organized by factor. This makes it easy to spot which companies have outstanding risks and in which areas.
Breach history
This section shows how many known breaches each company has experienced, broken out by time period:
- All Time
- Last 30 Days
- Last 90 Days
- Last 6 Months
- Last 12 Months
This helps you spot whether a company has a recent or recurring breach history, not just a one-time event further in the past.
Trend charts
Below the table, three charts let you track how each company has changed over time:
- Score History: How the overall score has trended.
- Breach Susceptibility Indicator History: How breach likelihood has trended.
- Ransomware Score History: How ransomware susceptibility has trended.
You can adjust the time period shown on each chart to zoom in on recent changes or view longer-term trends.
Exporting the comparison
To save the comparison as a PDF, click Print to PDF at the top of the comparison results.