SecurityScorecard, a provider of a service for determining cybersecurity risk levels, today named Michael Sweeney to be its vice president of worldwide alliances and channels.
Previously with Palo Alto Networks, the hiring of Sweeney coincides with several other executive appointments that included Nicole Stavroff, senior director of worldwide channels; Shaun Mahoney, senior director of strategic partnerships and alliances; and Jeffrey Webb, vice president of sales west.
As part of these moves, SecurityScorecard is looking to expand the number of partners reselling a security assessment service that provides the added benefit of helping partners uncover additional cybersecurity opportunities, says Sweeney.
The SecurityScorecard service is based on a software-as-a-service analytics application that leverages machine learning algorithms to scan all the IP addresses assigned to any organization. The analytics application then applies a risk score to those assets based on known threats and the level of cybersecurity being applied. Offered as an annual subscription, Sweeney says the SecurityScorecard service is capable of scanning more than eight billion IP-4 address around the globe.
“The secret sauce is Big Data, AI and machine learning,” says Sweeney.
While partners can make money reselling the SecurityScorecard service, Sweeney says the bigger opportunity is provided by uncovering all the places where an organization may need to strengthen their cybersecurity. All the data scanned by SecurityScorecard is public, so a partner doesn’t need the permission of a prospective customer to run a scan, adds Sweeney.
In many cases, Sweeney says partners wind up uncovering unsanctioned instances of IT by discovering IP addresses that the IT leadership was unaware had been assigned to the company.
Most end customers are anxious to know the results of those scans because they already know cybercriminals are running similar scans of their assets, says Sweeney. Insurers are also running scans to assess levels of risk before issuing cybersecurity policies, notes Sweeney.
In general, the attack surfaces most organizations are trying to defend are often so broad no one is quite sure where to focus their efforts or even start. While many organizations would prefer to discover those issues on their own by licensing tools such as SecurityScorecard, it may be in the best interest of solution providers to run those scans themselves to best determine where to focus their own sales effort around a larger portfolio of cybersecurity products and services.
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