In this article:
Risk Quantification is available as an add-on. Discuss options with your Customer Success Manager.
Use SecurityScorecard's Risk Quantification to understand the likelihood of cyberattacks and their estimated costs to any organization. With this insight, your security team and senior executives can make more informed decisions about where to allocate resources and justify your cybersecurity budget.
An attack by a threat actor can have significant financial impact on your organization that can extend far beyond the initial exploit or breach. Financial consequences of an attack, such as the following, can damage your market value and slow your growth as a business:
- Disrupted business operations that impact sales
- Ransomware payments
- Legal expenses
- Loss of customers due to reputation damage
How Risk Quantification works
Risk Quantification leverages loss calculation models by two industry-leading partners, RiskLens and ThreatConnect, to compute the financial impact of different types of cyberattacks, based on issues that SecurityScorecard discovers from an organization’s network assets.
Note: Talk to your Customer Success Manager about options for using partner models. Also, learn more about these models:
See the following table for descriptions of the attack types and the partner models that include them:
|
Attack category |
Description |
Included in |
|
Data breach |
An incident where a threat actor steals information from a system without the knowledge or authorization of the system's owner. |
RiskLens ThreatConnect |
|
Ransomware attack |
An incident where a type of malware encrypts sensitive files on an infected device, making them inaccessible to the targeted user or organization. The attack typically includes a threat to publish the files or permanently prevent their access unless the victim pays the threat actor to decrypt the files. |
RiskLens ThreatConnect |
|
Wiper attack |
An incident where a threat actor wipes, overwrites, or removes data from the victim's environment. Unlike typical cyberattacks for monetary gain, wiper attacks are destructive in nature and often do not involve a ransom. Wiper malware may, however, be used to conceal evidence of a separate data theft. |
ThreatConnect |
|
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack |
A malicious disruption of normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network in which a threat actor overwhelms the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic. |
RiskLens ThreatConnect |
The ThreatConnect calculation also reflects the type of threat actor staging the attack:
|
Actor |
Description |
|
Cybercriminal |
An individual or team that uses technology to commit malicious activities on digital systems or networks with the intention of stealing sensitive company information or personal data for profit. |
|
Hactivist |
A member of a criminal group that carries out cyberattacks in support of ideological causes. |
|
Nation state |
Threat actors who work within the legal guidelines of their countries to carry out attacks against other nations, companies, institutions, or individuals. They are highly trained, motivated, and mission focused. |
Set up your calculation
- Click the Risk Quantification tab on a Scorecard.
- If your Risk Quantification license includes both partner models, select the one you want to use for your current calculation. Otherwise, go to the next step.
- To select your industry, start typing numerals for your North American Industry Classification (NAICS) code, or start typing the letters of the name of your industry.
- Select the currency you want for your calculation.
- Enter your annual revenue by using one of the following methods:
-
- Type the full numeral. For example, for 100 million, type 100,000,000.
or - Use the letter shortcut keys to indicate the number of digits. For example, to indicate 100 million, type 100M. The form displays it as the full numeral.
- Type the full numeral. For example, for 100 million, type 100,000,000.
- Curate your assessment as desired with any of the following optional settings.
-
- Select the type of attack you want for your calculation.
- Select the type of threat actor you want for your calculation.
- Enter the number of records in your organization by type.
- Enter your organization’s cyber insurance coverage total.
- Select the type of attack you want for your calculation.
- Click Calculate.
View results
Survey the projected impact of an attack, parsed according to various aspects:
- Impact Range charts the financial impacts of all the types of attacks.
- If you added cyber insurance coverage to the calculation, it is mapped to the grid.
- If you added cyber insurance coverage to the calculation, it is mapped to the grid.
- Estimated financial impact, includes a visualized breakdown by types of losses.
- Predicted frequency demonstrates that attacks are not necessarily one-off events.
- Probability of compromise helps you determine where to prioritize resources.
- Data records compromised, only calculated for data breaches, helps you understand the operational and personal implications of an attack.
- PCI, PHI, and PII records break down cost per record type if a data breach occurs.
View suggestions to reduce the potential impact
See the table at the bottom of the page for factors you can prioritize for remediation to reduce projected impact of an attack. For example, in the following screenshot, remediating issues in the Application Security factor reduces the calculated impact by $497,000.
Edit calculation results
To change the results of your calculation, do the following:
- Click Show all controls at the top right of the screen
- Re-enter the values, and click Recalculate.
