The final mile for many Merger and Acquisition events is the security assessment. Once the acquiring party believes the business case is sound, the security team swings in for a final nod of approval. With little time to spare, security teams are less focused on surfacing every issue, as much as they are on prioritizing the riskiest– the things that would be costly to remediate, or recover from. Even organizations with strong security practices are not immune to the odd untracked asset or insidious vulnerability, but unfortunately these are often primary targets for motivated attackers once news of an M&A goes public.
To help organizations better assess risk of vulnerabilities or unknown attack surface, Bugcrowd is pleased to introduce Bugcrowd M&A Assessment. M&A Assessment leverages the Bugcrowd platform to simultaneously deploy software-based attack surface analysis and human-powered vulnerability discovery for a dual-prong approach to comprehensive risk analysis. Specially designed for organizations facing a tight deadline, M&A Assessment provides actionable insights on Day 1, enabling organizations to view uncovered assets and vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered, with final executive reporting and recommendations delivered in under 3 weeks.
The Bugcrowd M&A Assessment Difference:
- Launch in as Little as 72 Hours: Traditional pen test shops charge exorbitant fees to expedite testing, simply due to the shortage of resources available. Our fully-remote crowdsourced model provides access to thousands of uniquely skilled testers available immediately.
- NDA-backed Pentesters: M&As are highly sensitive events. M&A Assessment only deploys researchers backed by Non-Disclosure Agreements to ensure testing can proceed in the strictest confidence
- “Deep & Wide” Approach: Our Pen Test and Asset Inventory solutions have been combined and tuned to meet the unique needs of an M&A event. While results from each can be viewed independently, the final report considers output from both, as well as industry benchmark data before making a final recommendation.
- Real-Time Results: While security teams often have as little as 3 weeks to make a final decision, it shouldn’t take that long to start receiving critical insights. M&A Assessment provides Day-1access to streaming vulnerabilities and assets as soon as they are discovered. Our Asset Inventory solution relies on a pre-indexed view of the entire Internet to expedite inventory creation in hours, not weeks.
- Triage and Prioritization: Our team of security experts reviews every finding to eliminate noise, and prioritize critical vulnerabilities.
- Managed Service + Self-Serve: Security teams without a dedicated M&A arm can’t pause their day-job. Bugcrowd provides a fully-managed approach to find, validate, and prioritize high-risk assets and vulnerabilities, so you can focus on what matters. For teams that want to dig deeper, we provide training, tools, and on-demand reporting to support parallel analysis activities.
- Options for Tester Incentivization: CrowdMatch skills matching technology assigns testers best suited to every unique assessment, which can dramatically improve results over traditional testing methods. To incentivize discovery of more complex vulnerabilities found outside of typical testing methodologies, we offer the option to incentivize researchers per vulnerability. Programs with incentivization surface 2-3x more valid vulnerabilities than those without.
- Executive Reporting & Recommendations: Our team of security experts analyze all results to provide a clear and actionable ‘red,’ ‘yellow’, ‘green’ risk rating. Full details on methodology, findings, and rating taxonomy are also included in the final report.
The timelines for M&A’s may not improve. But security teams can at least feel more confident making tough decisions in a crunch with a solution designed to reduce risk and unknown attack surface in days rather than weeks. For more information on Bugcrowd M&A Assessment, check out the solution brief, visit our website, or get started today!
