In today’s digital landscape, organizations face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that can exploit various weaknesses in their IT infrastructure. While vulnerabilities in software systems have long been a concern, modern IT attack surfaces encompass a broader range of risks that extend beyond mere vulnerabilities. These risks include security misconfigurations, posture anomalies, and other potential entry points for attackers. To attain a good CyberHygiene score, having a good Vulnerability Management Software will be helpful.
To effectively address these risks, IT security teams must focus on fixing vulnerabilities and ensure proper configuration and security posture management. In order to manage and prioritize the mitigation of these risks, it is essential to have a metric that quantifies the overall state of an organization’s cybersecurity. This is where a Cyber Hygiene Score becomes crucial. Vulnerability Management Tool allows you to reach that goal.
A cyber hygiene score provides a quantifiable measure of an organization’s security posture and allows IT security teams to track the effectiveness of their security measures over time using Vulnerability Management Tool. Additionally, organizations can plan and allocate resources more effectively to address vulnerabilities and mitigate risks by having a cyber hygiene score. The score helps prioritize remediation efforts by highlighting areas with the highest potential impact on overall security.
This feature utilizes a data-driven, intelligent mathematical scoring model to assess the cyber hygiene of individual devices within your organization and calculate an overall score. With SanerNow Cyber Hygiene Score, we leave no stone unturned, comprehensively evaluating every aspect of your attack surface to provide a holistic measurement of your organization’s security and govern your compliance.
Benefits of Cyber-Hygiene Score
1. Quantify your Cybersecurity Posture: Get clear insights into what cyber risks your organization is exposed to.
2. Gauge the Effectiveness of your Cybersecurity Measures: By leveraging cyber-hygiene score you can evaluate the impact of your patching and other security strategies.
3. Track & Achieve Compliance Goals: Implementing compliance benchmarks when clubbed with a CHS core, allows you to achieve compliance goals with best possible cyber hygiene score.
4. Simplify Risk Communication with Stakeholders: A singular standard cyber hygiene score is easier to communicate to internal and external stakeholders and members of management when compared to lengthy reports and demonstrates cyber readiness.
An Overview of SanerNow Cyber Hygiene Score (CHS)
SanerNow Cyber Hygiene Score (CHS) is a data-driven, intelligent mathematical scoring model that quantifies your organization’s attack surface by evaluating the cyber hygiene of each device and computing it as a whole. Therefore With SanerNow CHS, we comprehensively evaluate every aspect of your attack surface to provide a holistic measurement of your organization’s security and govern your compliance.
Understanding SanerNow CHS
1. Device-Specific Cyber Hygiene Scores:
a. Raw Score:
Quantification of the total attack surface of your organization. A raw score is a real number that can range from zero to infinity and is a total of the weightage of CCE, CVE, Posture Anomalies, and missing patches. The default weightage for each of the four types of security risks is 25% and can be customized accordingly.
Note: Higher the Raw score, the less secure the device is.
b. Global Score:
The Global Score is a normalized Raw Score ranging from 0 to 100 and measures how secure a device is. While the Raw Score quantifies the ‘risk,’ the Global Score measures the ‘secureness’ of a device.
Note: Higher the Global Score, the more secure the device is.
c. Local Score:
The Local Score is another normalized score that determines where a particular device stands in an organization. Every device in the organization is assigned a score from 0 to 100, where 100 is assigned to the most secure device and 0 to the least.
d. Final Score:
The Final Score of a device is the weighted average of the Local and Global Scores of a device that ranges from 0 to 100. By default, the weightage of Global and Local Scores are 80% and 20%, respectively. The Final Score can be divided as:
i. Low: 0-40
ii. Good:41-80
iii. Better:81-100
2. Account-Specific Cyber Hygiene Score:
SanerNow calculates the Cyber Hygiene Score based on how the organization segments different sites or accounts that handle different departments.
Accordingly, every account will have its own CHS dashboard to provide insights on the attack surface in the account.
Based on the CHS of the individual devices in an account, Cyber Hygiene Score is calculated by taking its weighted average for the particular account and also Cyber Hygiene Trend for the account will also be calculated accordingly.
3. Organizational Cyber Hygiene Score:
The organization calculates the score by taking the weighted average of all the cyber hygiene scores of the accounts to which the user is currently logged in and has access.
The Organizational Dashboard provides insights into the attack surface of the organization and predicts the CHS with Cyber Hygiene Trend. Further, it also provides insights into high-risk devices, top-risk exposures, and more.
4. Contributors:
The CHS computes the effect of security risks that make up your organization’s attack surface. The main contributors to CHS are:
a. Common Vulnerability & Enumeration (CVE)
b. Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE)
c. Missing Patches
d. Posture Anomalies
By default, SanerNow assigns an equal weightage of 25% to each of the four main contributors.
5. Cyber Hygiene Trend :
By tracking the CHS over a period and plotting a graph, you get a visual representation of the change in CHS over time.
This representation allows you to picture the impact of your mitigation strategies and help you make informed decisions.
Taking a step further, SanerNow Cyber Hygiene Trend predicts the CHS score for the next day, assuming you take all the required remediation actions. The difference in the predicted and actual scores will demonstrate the impact of your remediation actions.
6. Frequency distribution of devices:
In the CHS Dashboard, you also get a frequency distribution of the cyber hygiene scores of all the devices in the account/organization. SanerNow automatically generates a frequency distribution that will allow you to instantly quantify devices based on a range of scores.
7. Top 5 Risk Exposures:
In the Cyber Hygiene Dashboard, you will get an overview of the top 5 risk exposures categorized based on the type of risk like CVE, CCE, Posture Anomaly, or Missing Patches. This list also allows you to prioritize remediation efforts and focus on mitigating risks in your network.
In summary, a cyber hygiene score serves as a critical tool for IT security teams to quantify their organization’s attack surface and measure the effectiveness of their security measures. It also enables informed decision-making, prioritization of remediation efforts, and continuous improvement of cyber hygiene practices. Moreover, by leveraging this metric, organizations can strengthen their security defenses and better protect their valuable digital assets from evolving cyber threats.