Bringing Cyber Risk into Focus With CIQ

NopalCyber
Aug 12
4 min read

Just about everyone wants to know more about cyber risk right now.

Security teams need it to find and fix weaknesses in the attack surface
C-suites and Boards of Directors have to factor it into all their strategic calculations
Regulators are looking for better ways to evaluate and enforce compliance
Insurance companies require it to set cyber insurance policies
Customers and vendors expect to know how third parties affect their own risk exposures
Investors use it to assess potential liabilities

All these parties have a stake in cyber risk, and they all want the same thing: a reliable and revealing way to track that risk. Unfortunately, that’s not easy when applying a qualitative risk assessment to an ever-expanding attack surface.

For one, qualitative assessments are time and labor intensive, making it difficult to get a complete, clear, or current understanding of cyber risk. Even more problematic, they’re inconsistent, causing different stakeholders to reach different conclusions about cyber risk that prevent them from aligning around the right response.

What’s missing is a “shared language” for cyber risk: a common way for any entity to quickly, easily, and accurately assess a company’s risk exposure.

With decades of collective cybersecurity experience, our team understood the struggle of helping executives and others make sense of cyber risk. We also knew that calls for more clarity and context were getting louder with each new data breach that grabbed headlines.

NopalCyber saw that a solution was overdue, so we created a whole new way to see cyber risk.

Introducing the Cyber Intelligence Quotient (CIQ)

In order to eliminate any uncertainty about a company’s level of cyber risk, we created a way to quantify it. Pronounced “seek”, the Cyber Intelligence Quotient (CIQ) tracks your cyber risk in real-time and expresses it as a number between 1 and 1,000.

It works in parallel with Nopal360, our proprietary platform for holistic cybersecurity. Nopal360 ingests data from throughout your security stack, whether or not we manage those products and services. You have countless ways to explore, analyze, and act upon the data inside the platform, and CIQ is a prime example.

The metric is based on data from six key sources of cyber risk:

Threat & Response
Maturity Assessment
Vulnerability Management
Cyber Resiliency
External Attack Surface
Cloud Security Posture

The CIQ score ingests data across all 6 of these sources - mapping external attack surface risks to known vulnerabilities, cloud security posture to identity leaks, potential vulnerabilities to attacks in process, and chained vulnerabilities to the MITRE Kill Chain. Beyond just counting the number of threats, the CIQ Score takes into account deep correlation to provide a holistic, actionable score.

After scoring risk in each category, the six scores get aggregated into a single metric, your CIQ score, which quantifies the cyber risk of the organization overall. The score then updates automatically in Nopal360 as new data becomes available, as does a detailed breakdown of where risks are present in each of the six categories.

Your CIQ score has endless applications, which we cover below, but it has two primary benefits. First, it expresses cyber risk in a numeric format that anyone can understand, whether they’re technical or not, which clearly quantifies how much cyber risk changes over time. Second, it provides a real-time perspective on cyber risk automatically, without the time and labor to collect data and calculate risk manually.

Cyber risk comes into focus like never before with CIQ. Now let’s look closer at what you can do with that perspective.

How Everyone Learns Something From CIQ

CIQ reveals something important to any party with an interest in your company’s cyber risk:

Security Teams: CIQ helps teams discover new or growing risks the minute they emerge, while also providing an easy format for reporting on cyber risk to leadership and other constituencies.
Leadership: A better understanding of cyber risk helps leaders align risk management with long-term planning and make bold decisions around things like digital transformation or AI adoption without creating big liabilities in the process.
Regulators: Although regulators will apply their own assessment methods, CIQ gives them, as well as anyone responsible for proving compliance, an accessible view into a company’s past and present cyber risk exposure.
Partners: Before deciding whether to trust your cybersecurity, partners like vendors, insurance providers, investors, and others can look at the CIQ to understand how your company has managed cyber risk over time.
Customers: The simple format of CIQ helps prospective customers quickly understand your cyber risk while signaling that your company takes that risk, as well as transparency, as seriously as customers.

Moving forward, it’s only reasonable to expect that more people will want more information about your cyber risk. With CIQ, you’re always ready to respond.

What Number is Your CIQ?

Qualitative risk assessments still have their place, but they will never be as accessible or as actionable as quantitative risk assessments like CIQ. Cyber risk needs a metric that can capture its complexity yet condense the key takeaways for quick consumption.

Not only does the cyber intelligence quotient strike that balance, but it automates the underlying scoring process so that diverse decision-makers have a direct view into cyber risk without any effort on their part. At a time when so many stakeholders need to monitor cyber risk closely, CIQ clears away the obstacles, combines the constituent parts, and creates a shared way to calculate risk. It’s one of the most meaningful metrics available—not just for the security team but the entire organization.

Are you looking for a better way to track cyber risk? Do you want to feel more confident in your risk assessment?

Find out your CIQ.