News
Making cyber-risks measurable
LocateRisk develops affordable and easy-to-use security monitoring for small and medium-sized businesses (KMU) and receives support from StartUpSecure
Since July, the LocateRisk project led by Lukas Baumann and his team has received a sum of 0.73 million euros through the BMBF subsidy program StartUpSecure. The existing startup wants to expand its project for its analytic system that evaluates attacking risks for businesses, and aims to provide small and medium-sized businesses with affordable alternatives to complicated, high-cost manual security audits. This innovative business venture does not only portray security risks within their own business, but it also initially monitors any available data of third parties, for example external service providers or business partners.
“IT security is an important topic and is still being disregarded by many businesses for a variety of reasons. With our solution, we would like to sensitise management for the topic of cybersecurity. In order to do that, we turned our complex analyses into simple and comprehensible information and draw attention to the increasing danger that arises from third party intersection,” that is how the IT security expert explains his motivation. With the help of the subsidy program in phase II, his team aims to accelerate the transfer to economy and to recruit new people. For a successful market penetration, improvements need to be made personnel-wise and in terms of a strategy for the market launch, whose long-term target will be the European market. The team of the eponymous foundation initiative StartUpSecure | ATHENE, located with the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT and the Technische Universität Darmstadt, consulted and supported the team for the application with their technical and economic expertise.
Making cyber-risks measurable and comparable
The innovative IT security solution facilitates measurement and comparison of cyber-risks. LocateRisk scans the digital footprint of a business and evaluates from an external attackers’ point of view how high the cyber-risk is for this business. For the first time, LocateRisk also performs Third Party Monitoring instead of just focusing on the business itself (First Party Monitoring). Multitudes of attacks happen through vulnerable points in IT from third parties, such as business partners or external service providers. In the next step, the highly complex analyses are displayed in a simple overview as a dashboard with easily comprehensible reports. This interactive report helps employees not familiar with IT to evaluate visible weaknesses and risks for themselves as well. Additionally, it provides guidance for IT departments to help close possible security gaps. This enables small and medium-sized businesses to improve their security situation proactively, and also to review and observe the effectiveness of the adopted measures.
show all news