Moody’s and Israeli cybersecurity platform Team8 are joining together to establish a global standard for evaluating and assessing cyber risk for businesses.
The joint venture will focus on ways to effectively measure and analyze cyber risks facing global corporations, ways to better understand a company’s vulnerability to cyber attacks, and, over time, how companies benchmark against others.
“There is a real necessity in the marketplace for an efficient, objective, and independent assessment mechanism to assess the cyber posture of companies around the world,” said Nadav Zafrir, co-founder and CEO of Team8. “We are excited to embark on this journey with Moody’s and are confident that together we can establish a first-of-its-kind global standard for evaluating the complex cyber risk facing enterprises.”
The service will also asses the cyber preparedness of acquired companies in mergers and acquisitions transactions or when purchasing cyber insurance policies, said Derek Vadala, chief executive of the joint venture and former global head of cyber risk at Moody’s.
“Companies doing business with each other are spending more and more resources on understanding what is the risk associated with doing business with third parties and fourth parties,” Team8 CEO Nadav Zafrir told Reuters.
“We believe that not only is that already slowing down the economy, but that we are going to see this slant continuing to deteriorate,” Zafrir added.
Cyber attacks are a serious risk for businesses. A stress-test for risk management found a coordinated global cyber attack spread through malicious email could cause damages between $85 billion and $193 billion.
Similar to how banks can check their stability with a stress test, Moody’s and Team8 are developing a framework to measure companies’ defenses and preparedness for such attacks in comparison to other businesses and over time.
The new company will be based in New York and Israel and will initially have a dozen employees that it expects to grow to hundreds in coming years. A model is being built and the company expects beta customers in a year, Vadala said. The goal is to engage thousands of companies so the index becomes the global standard, he said.
Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.