Risk Based Security: Actionable Threat Intelligence for Insurance Providers

Every now and then, a high-profile cyberattack involving a prominent company hits the headlines. In addition to the millions of dollars they pay as fines and for recovery measures, there is significant brand damage and loss of trust. Financial organizations, especially insurance companies are often targets of backdoor cyber activities, as they handle billions of bytes worth of PII, ranging from credit card data for premium payment to medical records for claim handling. In recent times, the insurance sector has turned more to data analyticsfor risk assessment and decision-making – not only to to counter attacks on their own organization but also to assess their customer’s cyber risk. Catering to the unique needs of the insurance sector is Risk Based Security (RBS), a Richmond, VA-based company that offers customized solutions for turning security data into insights for competitive advantage.

According to Inga Goddijn, EVP, Insurance Services at RBS, understanding the security posture of vendors, business partners and the entire supply chain is essential for identifying and managing third party risk. To that end, RBS provides clients with an array of solutions that focus on identifying the most vulnerable vendors and help with improving their security posture. To do this, RBS delivers three unique services, VulnDB for monitoring of vulnerabilities in software and hardware, Cyber Risk Analytics for five-star security ratings on third parties and YourCISO for building and improving information security risk management programs.

What makes the RBS solutions especially well suited for the insurance industry is their flexibility. Take Cyber Risk Analytics (CRA) as an example. The CRA platform was born out of data breach research conducted by RBS researchers. In addition to capturing information on over 36,000 data breach events, the tool also gathers hundreds of data points for generating 5-star security ratings.