Latest news with #AleksandrYampolskiy
Business Wire
12-08-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
SecurityScorecard Included on the 2025 Inc. 5000 List of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies for the 2nd Time
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- SecurityScorecard today announced it has been named to the annual Inc. 5000 list, the most distinguished ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The list provides a data-driven snapshot of the most successful companies within the economy's most dynamic segment—its independent, entrepreneurial businesses. Past honorees include companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Chobani, Under Armour, Timberland, Oracle, and Patagonia. 'Being named to the Inc. 5000 is a testament to the relentless dedication of our team and the trust our customers place in SecurityScorecard,' said Aleksandr Yampolskiy, CEO and Co-Founder of SecurityScorecard. 'As supply chain attacks dominate headlines, our mission to make the world a safer place by securing every organization's ecosystem has never been more critical. This recognition underscores that innovation and growth can go hand-in-hand with building a safer digital future.' This year's Inc. 5000 honorees have demonstrated exceptional growth while navigating economic uncertainty, inflationary pressure, and a fluctuating labor market. Among the top 500 companies on the list, the median three-year revenue growth rate reached 1,552 percent, and those companies have collectively added more than 48,678 jobs to the U.S. economy over the past three years. With more than ten consecutive quarters of revenue growth and more than 3,000 customers worldwide, SecurityScorecard is accelerating its market leadership and redefining how organizations secure their digital supply chains. This momentum is fueled by relentless, customer-driven innovation, showcased through major milestones, including: Channel Growth Anchored by SCORE Partner Program and MAX Innovations: During the first half of 2025, SecurityScorecard increased its channel-sourced pipeline by 124% year-over-year, further deepening its global ecosystem of MSSPs, VARs, and technology partners through the company's channel-first SCORE Partner Program. Launch of MAX Workstation for Service Providers: Since its launch in Q1 of 2024, MAX has grown by over 370%, and is the company's fastest-growing product. The launch of MAX Workstation enables service delivery teams to harness the power of AI to enable detection and response across their clients' extended supply chain, driving both new business revenue and retention. STRIKE Research Threat Intelligence: In the past year, STRIKE Research released over 10 reports delivering deep analyses on nation-state actors and emerging cyber risks. Drawing on 12B+ daily security signals and decades of intelligence expertise, STRIKE is driving forward-looking insights that help organizations anticipate and counter the world's most sophisticated threats. Strategic Agreement with KPMG in Canada: SecurityScorecard and KPMG in Canada joined forces to bring SecurityScorecard MAX to critical infrastructure sectors across Canada, strengthening national cyber resilience. StateRAMP and FedRAMP Ready Designations: SecurityScorecard announced it is now StateRAMP Ready and re-certified as FedRAMP Ready, enabling government agencies to manage supply chain risk more effectively. 'Making the Inc. 5000 is always a remarkable achievement, but earning a spot this year speaks volumes about a company's tenacity and clarity of vision,' says Mike Hofman, editor-in-chief of Inc. 'These businesses have thrived amid rising costs, shifting global dynamics, and constant change. They didn't just weather the storm—they grew through it, and their stories are a powerful reminder that the entrepreneurial spirit is the engine of the U.S. economy.' Key Resources: For the full list, company profiles, and a searchable database by industry and location, visit: Follow SecurityScorecard on LinkedIn Book a demo with the SecurityScorecard team. Download the latest STRIKE threat research. Methodology Companies on the 2025 Inc. 5000 are ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2021 to 2024. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2021. They must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2024. (Since then, some on the list may have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2021 is $100,000; the minimum for 2024 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. About SecurityScorecard SecurityScorecard created Supply Chain Detection and Response (SCDR), transforming how organizations defend against the fastest-growing threat vector—supply chain attacks. Our industry-leading security ratings serve as the foundation and core strength, while SCDR continuously monitors third-party risks using our factor-based ratings, automated assessments and proprietary threat intelligence, to resolve threats before they become breaches. MAX enables response and remediation capability, working through our service partners to protect the entire supply chain ecosystem while strengthening operational resilience, enhancing third-party risk management and mitigating concentrated risk. Trusted by over 3,000 organizations—including two-thirds of the Fortune 100—and recognized as a trusted resource by the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Backed by Evolution Equity Partners, Silver Lake Partners, Sequoia Capital, GV, NGP, Intel Capital and Riverwood Capital, SecurityScorecard delivers end-to-end supply chain cybersecurity that safeguards business continuity. Learn more at or follow us on LinkedIn.
Forbes
25-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
5 Mental Models For CISOs To Sharpen Their Cybersecurity Strategy
Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy, Co-Founder and CEO of SecurityScorecard, is a globally recognized cybersecurity innovator, leader and expert. As a competitive chess player, I've learned that success comes from recognizing patterns quickly. You centralize your king in the endgame, but never during the opening. You don't spread your queen too thin by making her guard too many pieces at once. The same principle guides the best chief information security officers (CISOs) I've interviewed at Fortune 1000 companies. They lean on mental models—simple frameworks that turn complex situations into clear decisions. Here are five mental models I've found CISOs can immediately use to sharpen their decision making: 1. Pre-Mortem And Pre-Parade Work backward from outcomes. In a pre-mortem, imagine your security strategy has failed spectacularly. Was it a breach? Budget cuts? A leadership shake-up? Identify what specifically went wrong in these scenarios: Did patching cadence falter while you addressed other priorities? Did your boardroom lose confidence in your abilities? Why? Now proactively address those issues and inoculate yourself. Pre-mortems can help you and your teams find blind spots before reality does it for you. Don't stop at imagining worst-case scenarios; imagine your wins, too. A pre-parade involves imagining great success—perhaps you've just been promoted, or your team successfully shortened the time it takes your organization to detect a cybersecurity incident. Maybe you and your team are surpassing your vulnerability management goals. What did you do right? Which teams collaborated seamlessly, and what steps did it take to get there? Identify the key components of success and break it down into specific steps you need to take over the next 10, 30, 60 and 90 days to make that vision a reality. 2. 5x5x5 Experimentation If you knew precisely what would work, you'd already be doing it. Good ideas and bad ideas can look very similar in the beginning, and you can't tell them apart until you test them. The 5x5x5 framework by Mike Schrage is a fast, effective way to experiment without risk. It's radically simple and, if done right, it could have an immediate and profound effect on your team's direction. Start by launching experiments that meet three requirements: 1. Five people 2. $5,000 3. Five days Instead of overanalyzing or running 100 miles per hour in the wrong direction, test quickly and incrementally. If your IT team isn't fixing vulnerabilities fast enough, try five simple, testable solutions within a week. Offer small bonuses or alert management when tickets exceed the service level agreement (SLA). Focus on speed, learning and iteration—not perfection. 3. Local Maximum Versus Global Maximum Excelling as a CISO means more than just working toward your local maximum (in this case, securing the organization). You must also ask how you can deliver a global maximum: broader business value. Think like a CEO and do both. Can you create a security trust center to streamline your sales team and security contract reviews? You could make your security ratings a selling point for consumers, not just a metric. Could automating third-party risk reviews reduce costs? Good CISOs protect business, but great CISOs grow it. If you're not tying security to revenue generation, customer trust or speed of execution, you're likely thinking too small. 4. Semaphore (Red/Yellow/Green) Parallel key performance indicators (KPIs) and objective measures to the colors of traffic lights to understand your true progress on security metrics. Too many teams live in the land of "all green," where everything is fine. But that's not visibility—that's denial. Encourage your teams to highlight areas for improvement that may fall in the yellow or red categories to stress-test your current approach. Quantify security decisions using clear metrics for every program, from access reviews to vulnerability management. Clearly identify costs, risk reduction and improvement over time. Security ratings can serve as a useful barometer for benchmarking against your industry peers—and can help highlight when an "all green" assessment is masking risk. 5. Domino Effect Prevention The domino effect prevention model suggests accidents result from interconnected events, each like a falling domino that sets off the next. Remove one domino, and you prevent the cascade before it even begins. To make this framework work, be proactive and resilient. Deploy an enterprise secure browser to stop phishing at the source, implement supply chain detection and response (SCDR) to continuously monitor vendors for security risks and invest in endpoint protection solutions like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne. Focus on stopping threats before they trigger the chain reaction. Don't Wait For Checkmate Leadership in cybersecurity is about thinking clearly under pressure and planning to prevent a crisis before it hits. These models can help you cut through the noise and get razor-sharp on where you stand and where you need to be. When I became CISO at Gilt Groupe, I ran a pre-mortem and asked myself a blunt question: What would get me fired? The answer was clear—a breach that compromised credit card data and cost us our PCI DSS compliance, threatening both our reputation and our ability to process payments. That fear pushed us to redesign our entire architecture, isolating payment data in a hardened, bulletproof environment. We also implemented layered encryption so that no single person and no single point of failure could unlock access. That kind of clarity—seeing the worst-case scenario and planning backward from it—forced us to confront the unimaginable and design for it. Without that mindset, we would've never built such a resilient architecture. Just as elite chess players might recognize signs that an opponent is preparing an attack on their king and reposition their pieces in advance, cybersecurity leaders must proactively identify and eliminate blind spots before they spiral out of control. Stop reacting to what's in front of you and start seeing the board five moves ahead. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
