Private Equity and M&A

Portfolio Benchmarking and Technical Due Diligence

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Cybeta Solutions

Protecting Portfolio Value Through Risk Visibility and Threat Mitigation

Private equity companies are popular targets because funds often lack the visibility, control, and consistent tools to monitor cyber risks across their holdings. Leveraged assets can magnify breach losses, while a reputation of poor security can make capital raises and future deals more difficult. Minimize those risks with PE Watch, an analyst-driven intelligence solution with three objectives for your portfolio: risk visibility, value protection, and threat mitigation.

PE Watch can analyze pre- and post-close investments, align to compliance requirements, measure cyber investment ROI, assess affiliate risk across the portfolio, estimate losses for insurance coverage, and mitigate threats through analyst-generated roadmaps. PE Watch’s reporting helps manage risks and mitigate threats to protect portfolio value throughout the investment lifecycle.

PE Watch Key Features Include:

Baseline Enterprise Cyber Risk

We provide visibility into portfolio risk by conducting a non-invasive external examination of your portfolio using our signature low-touch approach with zero connectivity required. This can determine which investment needs more attention and which ones have relatively less risk.

Benchmarking & Trend Analysis

We provide over 20 security benchmarks that rank performance on a fund-by-fund and portfolio basis. This can be used to demonstrate security maturity to other external stakeholders, obtain higher exit multiples, and reduce deal risk.

Breach Calculation for VaR, ROI, & Insurance

We calculate the impact of cyber risk scenarios on the entire portfolio and individual investments. This can determine the value at risk and ROI of your security spend and is ideal for understanding cyber insurance coverage.

Internal Security Capabilities

Our data science experts assessed thousands of insurance survey questions to find top company responses correlating to robust internal defensive capabilities. This generated a simpler process to assess portfolio security and benchmark those responses to other investments.

Vendor Risk Assessment

We assess inherited risk by analyzing vulnerabilities within vendor network footprints and rank them based on severity and impact. This can be used to better understand dependencies, track improvement, and increase leverage during negotiations.

Prioritized Remediation Roadmap

Our methodology provides recommendations prioritized by their impact on the entire portfolio. This includes a highlighted list of improvements a fund manager can implement at scale and decrease risk.

Threat Hunting & Intelligence

Relying on outdated cyber due diligence reports can miss emerging threats. We examine complex adversary infrastructure and patterns in the deep and dark web to identify actionable intelligence that could lead to a cyber risk scenario impacting your portfolio investment.

Your Dedicated Analyst

PE Watch is differentiated by our team of real security practitioners. Our analysts share their findings and insights through live readouts to CFOs, operating partners, boards of directors.

PE Watch Offerings

Your General Partner for the Investment & Fundraising Lifecycle

One breach can undermine the partnership’s overall returns and reputation. Conducting comprehensive cyber due diligence is important to avoid introducing avoidable security risks into your portfolio. PE Watch can help you to discover how those risks compare to the existing portfolio benchmarks across the industry.

Pre-Deal Due Diligence

Before making a new investment, it is important to determine what cybersecurity risks you are introducing into your portfolio. Benchmarking existing portfolio risks and developing a plan to mitigate threats are part of a comprehensive cybersecurity due diligence assessment.

Post-Deal Investment

Following a roadmap to mitigate risks after a deal closes is important. Equally important is doing so within an appropriate budget and timeline to maximize investment returns. PE Watch’s cyber due diligences and company-specific reports provide the details to ensure quick and thorough improvements for new investments.

Manage Growth

Threats rapidly change, so it is important to have regular portfolio assessments to ensure that individual investments stay within your risk boundaries. Instead of each portfolio company making individual risk decisions, prioritizing portfolio-wide investments can provide the biggest ROI.

Exit and Harvest

Whether it is a carveout, IPO, merger, or something else, it will be imperative to demonstrate cybersecurity risks are acceptable and that your investments took the necessary steps to avoid a potential cyber risk scenario. Maintaining a lower-risk posture can lead to better exit multiples and overall returns.

Fundraising

By obtaining validation from a third party, you can demonstrate to potential capital suppliers that your fund and investment strategy carry a lower risk profile. Accessing capital at a lower cost can result in higher returns, all else being equal.

PE Watch Features Can Also Provide:

Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment

Companies cannot prevent every breach or transfer all their financial risk. We incorporate a “trust but verify” approach to determine a company’s capabilities that reduces any potential for bias when understanding a network environment and any ingress points a threat actor could exploit.

Cybersecurity Compliance Certification

Compliance is a major resource investment that can improve security capability while also signaling that your portfolio is in safer hands. PE Watch provides access to a real-time, flexible, and automated compliance platform to pursue certifications like ISO, FedRamp, SOC2, NIST, and GDPR.

Incident Response Planning

The longer it takes to recover from an incident the greater the potential disruption to your critical business functions. PE Watch assists incident response planners by identifying designated management roles and defines response and communication processes that can reduce the confusion and missteps during a material event.

Private Equity

Our Methodology

PE Watch utilizes five simple yet thorough steps to help fund managers understand their risk and protect value.

STEP 1

Information Gathering

From confirming holdings and investment sizes to understanding internal security capabilities, PE Watch collects the necessary information to produce a comprehensive cybersecurity analysis in this phase.

STEP 2

Risk Visibility Analysis

PE Watch will conduct an external assessment of portfolio threats to determine the riskiness of each investment/asset, benchmark cyber risks against others, and examine how those trends change over time.

STEP 3

Value Protection

Once you know your risks, it will be critical to quantify potential damages, consider investment in appropriate preventative and detective controls, and understand how the transfer of risk through cyber insurance can defend your investments from potential breaches.

STEP 4

Threat Mitigation

PE Watch produces prioritized vulnerability mitigation lists, ranks affiliates by riskiness to reduce enterprise exposure, and provides a detailed analysis to mitigate threats.

STEP 5

Ongoing Support

You’ll have access to PE Watch analysts for additional feedback and recommendations that are hard to capture in a report. Feel free to ask for help and advice anytime.

Cybeta generates predictive analytics about the likelihood of future cyber events while delivering actionable intelligence focused on pre-attack infrastructure, supply chain risk, and metric-driven technology intelligence. We are comprised of former national security professionals and data science experts who do not believe you can automate human expertise.

Office Locations

Chicago:
30 South Wacker Drive Floor 22
Chicago, IL 60606

Indianapolis:
12175 Visionary Way
Suite 880
Fishers, IN 46038

(779) 429-2382