Breach Level Index: A New Way of Thinking

With all of the recent high-profile breaches in the last year such as Equifax, Dow Jones, and River Cities Media, it seems the media hones in mainly on the scope of the incident, i.e. how many people were impacted.  While the amount of people impacted by a breach is important information, it is critical to not fall into the trap of thinking that the size of the breach is the stand-alone biggest factor in determining the severity of a cyber-attack.  A highly regarded security executive, Richard Stiennon, and the folks over at IT-Harvest have spent a great deal of effort to put together the Breach Level Index (BLI)— what many are viewing as a new way of categorizing security breaches.

The BLI blends together key factors such as breach size, contents recovered, source of breach, and any follow-up actions that have been taken into one single metric.  Similar to the Richter Scale, the most widely used scale for categorizing earthquakes, the BLI invokes a logarithmic based scaling.  With this scaling, the BLI provides a risk assessment score between 0 and 10 based-on the previously mentioned factors and breaks down Breach Level Severity into the following five categories:

Due to growing internal system complexity and wide range of information now stored digitally, security breaches can no longer be viewed as either having occurred, or not— Not all breaches are created equal.  Because of this, the BLI Risk Assessment is a great tool for evaluating the risks and potential fallout from any one breach.  Any business can leverage the BLI methodology to better assess the impact of a security breach and to help set benchmarks and security standards.  While breaches of any degree of severity are unfavorable, using the BLI can assure your organization is setting strategies in place to mitigate the likelihood of Severe or Catastrophic breaches and is properly monitoring risk.

Download our breach risk calculator and log to see how your organization stacks up on the breach level index.  For more information on global breach statistics, the public breach database, check out the BLI Dashboard at: http://breachlevelindex.com/.