Advice for Investors: The Cyber Security Balance Sheet

Pythia Cyber has experience in doing due diligence for investors which is why we invented the concept of Cybersecurity Debt. This concept serves two purposes: first, to keep your cybersecurity decisions balanced between short-term expediency and long-term security but second to give stakeholders--senior management or investors--a sense of the cybersecurity balance sheet. In other words, how safe are you right now and how much time and money would it take to make you as safe as is feasible?

Every investor knows that the balance sheet is key to any decision to invest in an enterprise. Every investor can read a balance sheet and has some idea of the short-term and long-term financial picture of any investment target.

Savvy investors have become aware of operations issues which lurk in the future, including issues rooted in technology. But too few investors pay the same level of heed to the equivalent issues in the cybersecurity domain.

This is exactly what Pythia Cyber's stakeholder-oriented offering is all about: giving the stakeholder, who is likely not a cybersecurity expert, a sense of what kind of cybersecurity liability they are buying. This is more nuanced than a list of suggested actions to address present shortcomings. This is an assessment of what time and money would be required to take to get the target's cybersecurity from its current state to a reasonable and customary state.

Note that we don't write a detailed report of suggested actions, milestones or give you a road map if you only want a gross indication of what is required. If you aren't going to make the investment, you don't need to know the details of what you are not going to do.

Instead we give you what you need: the basis for a yes /  no, go / no go  decision. If yes, then we can talk about the details. If no, then we all turn out attention to more useful pursuits.

Upgrade your due diligence to include something you know you need to know: what would it cost me to get this investment target to where I need them to be in terms of cybersecurity?