Governments bolster critical infrastructure security through real-time monitoring and information sharing

BOSTON, Oct. 2, 2020 — BitSight, the Standard in Security Ratings, has reached a critical milestone, with 38 countries, representing one-fifth of all governments worldwide, now using BitSight solutions to monitor and manage cyber risk to critical national infrastructure. BitSight works with national governments to help manage national cyber risk through security ratings and analytics, which provide visibility and awareness of security performance of critical national infrastructure that can be used to identify vulnerabilities at scale, model systemic risk, enable close collaboration to reduce the likelihood of a national incident, and measure the effectiveness of policy. Countries with government organizations using BitSight include Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Iceland, The Netherlands, Spain, and the United States.

The vulnerability of national critical infrastructure on a global scale is being thrust into the limelight through attacks on hospitals, the defense industrial base, energy companies, and even medical research. Governments around the world lack visibility into the security performance of critical infrastructure and struggle to determine the effectiveness of the policies they enact. By leveraging BitSight, countries across the globe are able to gain new insight into aggregated risk, vulnerability, and security effectiveness of critical infrastructure and make data-driven decisions to reduce risk.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, BitSight partnered with the National Education and Research Network (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa — RNP) in Brazil to help to protect Brazilian health institutions in its backbone against potential cyber attacks. RNP is an advanced national network for higher education, research, and innovation that enables collaboration and communication in the fields of teaching and research. "At this moment, it is fundamental to support health institutions that are experiencing high demand for their services," said the Executive Director of RNP, Eduardo Grizendi. "Any unavailability or security incident can cause serious damage to patients and users."

The BitSight platform makes it possible for the RNP to assess the cyber risk of health institutions during the pandemic. According to Emilio Nakamura, Chief Information Security Officer of the RNP, "there was a great complementarity between BitSight and the other solutions already used by the security team (CAIS) which improved the RNP’s ability to monitor institutions and help them prevent and address their problems."

In Belgium, BitSight partnered with a government agency and Agoria, a large professional association of more than 2,000 technology-inspired companies, to directly engage with a large number of important companies to understand and improve their cybersecurity posture leveraging BitSight data and metrics.

"During the coronavirus pandemic, it was important for us to offer our member organizations a way to better understand their security performance as well as the right data to improve and remediate any risk," said Yves Schellekens, Business Group Leader Industries for Agoria. "BitSight helped us to scale up our efforts and offered a vehicle to continuously measure the effect of this engagement. We will look to enhance our collaboration with member organizations and improve security behaviors within Belgium leveraging the data delivered by BitSight."

"Protecting critical infrastructure from cyber attack is one of the most important governmental missions," said Francisco Fonseca, VP of National Cybersecurity at BitSight. "Countries trust BitSight to provide valuable, real-time security performance insights that they can’t get anywhere else and a method for sharing information that measurably reduces risk. We are honored to partner with so many countries to help them fulfill this critical mission."

For more information on BitSight’s work with national governments, please visit https://www.bitsight.com/national-cybersecurity.

About BitSight
BitSight transforms how organizations manage cyber risk. The BitSight Security Ratings Platform applies sophisticated algorithms, producing daily security ratings that range from 250 to 900, to help organizations manage their own security performance; mitigate third party risk; underwrite cyber insurance policies; conduct financial diligence; and assess aggregate risk. With over 2,100 global customers and the largest ecosystem of users and information, BitSight is the Standard in Security Ratings. For more information, please visit www.bitsight.com, read our blog or follow @BitSight on Twitter.

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