Humans are, by definition, the source of human risks within each organization, contributing to 82% of data breaches, according to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Their everyday behaviors, decisions, and actions can affect an organization’s overall security. By transforming data surrounding human behaviors—including their levels of data access and the frequency of targeted cybersecurity attacks—into quantifiable, measurable metrics, organizations can objectively identify the impact of various risks and prioritize potential threats, allowing for clearer, more effective risk management and mitigation strategies.
This data-driven approach allows organizations to pinpoint their biggest security threats targeting their workforce, improve decision-making, and tailor interventions based on the impact a threat imposes. While valuable insights like siloed risk metrics and training completion rates promote accountability within individual teams and the organization as a whole, they focus on isolated aspects of risk. By marrying risk data to quantify human risks, organizations can better understand human risks according to their impact on the organization. This comprehensive approach supports an efficient and proactive risk management strategy across the entire organization.
In The Forrester Wave™: Human Risk Management Solutions, Q3 2024 report, the research and advisory company suggests organizations should look to partner with an HRM provider that uses “a correct definition of risk, evaluating the likelihood and impact of harm to your organization,” followed by the reminder that “The more granular the data [the] better you will be able to measure and manage risk.” Living Security understands the weight of these recommendations, and delivers a platform that not only aligns with these principles but also empowers organizations with real-time quantified data, insights, and recommendations.
Living Security offers an advanced and comprehensive Human Risk Management platform, Unify, to does the risk quantification for you. Unify integrates existing security tools to streamline and analyze data in one platform, providing organizations with a holistic view of the combination of cyber risks their workforce faces. Unify measures over 250 individual behaviors, varying from training participation and phishing interactions, to password management and handling sensitive data. Taking into consideration variable factors including risky and vigilant behaviors, external threats, and individual access levels within the organization, Unify’s HRI (Human Risk Index) thoroughly evaluates data to provide individual and organizational risk quantification scores. By turning actions into data, human risks can be addressed and mitigated to strengthen overall security and enable organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats.
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The Human Risk Index (HRI) is Living Security's proprietary unit of measurement that uses a Bayesian Network to provide a risk score that estimates the likelihood and impact of human behaviors on overall security posture. The HRI calculates a risk score from 0-1000 by analyzing internal and external data from three key categories: user behaviors, external threats, and user access. The Human Risk Index allows your organization to directly quantify behaviors and threats to identify risky and vigilant employees, and the actions that contribute to these identifications.
Quantified data is displayed in a visually digestible format that makes it easy to identify HRI risk scores, recognize specific risky and vigilant users, provide aggregate scores for individual departments, and more. Included filters empower managers to review data and scores based on individual departments, specified access levels, or individual behavioral actions. The HRI’s risk quantification data equips users with actionable information that fosters a positive security culture, boosts employee confidence, and drives safer, more vigilant security behaviors.
Living Security’s Unify platform integrates data from existing security tools, allowing organizations to streamline human risk quantification into one inclusive platform. Available integration sources include: Email, Endpoint, Web, Training and LMS, Identity and Access Management, HR/Change, SIEM, UEBA and DLP, and uploaded resources such as clean desk infractions.
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Unify quantifies human risk data to provide an outcome-oriented view of risk, coupled with AI recommendations initiating personalized nudges and training interventions, without leaving the platform. Proven to reduce human risks and create a vigilant, empowered security culture, Living Security supplies your organization with resources that drive safer, conscious security behaviors that mitigate human risks and improve overall security.
Adopting human risk management and taking hold of risk quantification is vital for understanding and addressing the potential impact of human risks on an organization. Immediate, practical starting steps that can support your organization include assessing current security tools to identify gaps in data integrations, establishing regular meetings to share insights on human risk, and building a roadmap of necessary data points that support your organization transitioning from high risk to vigilance. Explore human risk quantification further with these free resources:
Forrester has established 35 criteria- including Human Risk Quantification- to score Human Risk Management vendors on. Analysts created scaled explanations for each criterion, and scored each vendor against these scales, along with weighting criteria according to importance (Forrester, 2024). Based on this scoring method, Living Security received a perfect 5.0/5.0 score for Human Risk Quantification, and was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Human Risk Management Solutions. Learn more about Living Security's ranking in The Forrester Wave™ here.