FICO boosts its Enterprise Security Score for data breach prediction

The Score gives subscribers the ability to assess the forward-looking cyber breach risk of their organization and their partners, and improves breach insurance underwriting. Additionally, integration of industry-standard firmographic data and reference identifiers enables identification of subject organizations and provides additional insight for key supply chain management tasks. FICO has incorporated this information into the product’s user interface, and has enabled streamlined entity identification by common firmographic reference identifiers.

FICO uses machine learning techniques to associate features describing the conditional and behavioral characteristics of organizations’ security practices with outcome data (breaches and non-breaches). The result is a supervised model that quantifies the likelihood of a significant breach event happening over a 12-month period. Because FICO collects data continuously against the entire IP address space, the training data set is always ready to absorb new breach cases, and the scoring engine is always ready to consider time-dependent organizational behavior when calculating the risk of breach.

The new scoring algorithm, integration of firmographic data and related enhancements in the user interface are now in production and in use by FICO’s subscribers.