10Fold helps the company establish a thought leadership position and amplify business and broadcast coverage.
Founded in 2013, New York-based SecurityScorecard is the global leader in cybersecurity ratings, response, and resilience solutions, with over 12 million companies continuously rated. Its patented and easy-to-understand A-F graded scorecards are used by over 50,000 organizations for enterprise risk management, third-party risk management, board reporting, due diligence, cyber insurance underwriting, and regulatory oversight.
Under 10Fold’s guidance, SecurityScorecard increased its media coverage by 44% and the number of feature articles by 137% in the second half of 2022 compared to the first half.
Situation
10Fold began working with SecurityScorecard in mid-August 2022. Despite having a lead in share of voice against competitors and a handful of business press articles in the six months leading up to its partnership with 10Fold, its coverage was primarily driven by brief mentions in Tier 2 and Tier 3 technology outlets. Only a few tier-1 publications had published articles leveraging insight from SecurityScorecard two or more times during this period. SecurityScorecard was growing rapidly as a company and wanted additional focus on building its brand and solidifying its position as a unicorn in cybersecurity. 10Fold was brought in to increase the quality of SecurityScorecard’s media coverage while maintaining the overall quantity.
Objectives:
10Fold worked with SecurityScorecard to establish three key objectives for the first six months of the partnership:
- Cultivate more robust trade and business press media relationships for the SecurityScorecard threat intelligence, government affairs teams, and executives.
- Ensure at least 50% of coverage comes from feature-length articles (defined as SecurityScorecard being mentioned in three or more paragraphs) to support customer and sales engagement.
- Build a more substantial presence in broadcast media and top-tier business and public sector publications.
Strategy:
To elevate SecurityScorecard’s presence in tier-one media outlets, 10Fold began by identifying SecurityScorecard’s available assets and determining how to best leverage them in media engagements. Sourcing calls were conducted with key subject matter experts within the public and insurance sectors, as well as the threat intelligence team, to take inventory of the key spokespeople and their backgrounds, expertise, and interests. Sourcing call insights combined with hot industry trends created the perfect opportunity to raise SecurityScorecard’s profile. It was determined there was untapped potential within its threat intelligence team, its cybersecurity ratings scorecards of over 12 million companies, and the unique point of view (POV) of its public sector spokespeople.
10Fold designed a rapid response program for SecurityScorecard’s threat intelligence team to share commentary on breaking cybersecurity news. 10Fold began drafting commentary leveraging an approved quote bank for a same-day turnaround to increase the likelihood of inclusion in key stories covering the latest attacks and breaches. 10Fold also began leveraging SecurityScorecard’s cyber health ratings system in media outreach to provide reporters with grade-letter scores for companies involved in cyber incidents, offering threat researchers for interviews and commentary opportunities providing their unique insights.
10Fold sought to elevate public sector coverage by capitalizing on a deep bench of experts, which included experience with the U.S. Congress, National Intelligence, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and identity policy. We recommended leveraging a series of public-facing thought leadership activities, including rapid response, interviews and contributed content, to build on the current conversations surrounding cybersecurity policy initiatives.
10Fold leveraged its relationships with key security and technology reporters regularly covering the evolving nature of federal cybersecurity regulation and executive orders in outlets including The Hill and POLITICO, to strategically position SecurityScorecard’s subject matter experts to explain complex cybersecurity scenarios and challenges from both a public and private sector perspective. The topics they spoke to included why a national cybersecurity approach is needed to inform action and investment and get measurable results at scale, the importance of information sharing and cybersecurity-related policy changes from CISA and the Biden Administration.
Results:
In just four months, 10Fold made considerable progress in achieving SecurityScorecard’s key goals of establishing more meaningful relationships with top-tier media, increasing its number of feature articles, and expanding coverage in the public sector vertical. As a result of the editorial program 10Fold created, SecurityScorecard exceeded goals by not only improving quality but also increasing quantity. The company saw an increase in features from 1H to 2H in 2022 by 137%, contributing to a 44% increase in coverage over the same period.
Within the first week of engagement with SecurityScorecard, 10Fold secured four interviews for the threat research team on the Twitter Whistleblower news, resulting in feature coverage in Axios, TechTarget and CyberNews. 10Fold also placed a SecurityScorecard threat researcher’s commentary in the Associated Press within the program’s first month.
10Fold helped SecurityScorecard elevate the quality of its public sector coverage by increasing its Tier 1 public sector coverage by 150%, including an interview and feature article in POLITICO with Sue Gordon, a new SecurityScorecard board member who previously served as the former deputy director of U.S. national intelligence. 10Fold also placed a contributed article in The Hill and secured two podcast interviews with FedScoop’s The Daily Scoop Podcast and The Federal Government Today.
Total coverage for SecurityScorecard from August to December 2022 included 121 articles. The company led share of voice with a full 24 more articles than the nearest competitor. Furthermore, the meaningful relationships built with business and tier 1 trade reporters resulted in two business press articles and 13 tier 1 trade articles publishing because of media outreach in the first month of 2023 alone.
Top Coverage
- Bloomberg, Messaging App’s Response to Bug Hits on Cyber Disclosure Issues
- The Wall Street Journal, S. Cyber Plans Are Built to Endure Political Winds, Senior Security Official Says
- Politico Pro, Russian attacks put cyber atop international agenda
- The Associated Press, Serious breach at Uber spotlights hacker social deception
- The Hill, Why the public and private sectors must join forces to address cyber risk for national security
- Axios, Twitter’s security alarm
- TechTarget, Twitter whistleblower report holds security lessons
- VentureBeat, Uber breach shows third-party vendors are the weakest link
- CyberNews, Covering losses from certain nation-state cyber attacks and those that happen during wars
- Dark Reading, Uber Breached, Again, After Attackers Compromise Third-Party Cloud
- The Daily Scoop Podcast, The path ahead for DOD spending and its zero trust strategy; Closing the loop on IT acquisitions
- NBC Bay Area, Oakland Declares State of Emergency Due to Ransomware Attack
- NBC Bay Area, Cyber-Security Expert Discusses Oakland Ransomware Attack
- NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, Dallas Ransomware Attack Contained, But Ongoing; Police, Fire Service Uninterrupted