There is seemingly no end to the challenges MSSPs and MSPs face, from protecting the dozens of clients from new AI-based automated threats to running their businesses in a saturated market.
Key among the challenges facing security services providers are differentiation – the market is crowded, and many providers offer similar services – to customers becoming more educated and demanding, according to
Huzeyfe Onal, co-founder and CEO of extended threat intelligence platform provider
SOCRadar. Prospects expect them to show value before they will buy anything.
Then there is profitability.
“Competition continues to increase, which puts pressure on pricing and margins,” Onal told MSSP Alert. “However, the cost of delivering security services remains high because cybersecurity is still heavily dependent on skilled human talent. MSSPs are constantly looking for ways to scale their business, generate more qualified opportunities, and improve operational efficiency without significantly increasing headcount.”
This is where intelligence-driven sales and automation can make “a significant difference,” he said.
Enter Hacker Score
That’s what SOCRadar is offering with Hacker Score, a free – for a limited time – AI-powered tool MSSPs and MSPs can use to help organizations quickly understand how attractive a target they are from an attacker’s perspective.
“The platform automatically evaluates more than 150 external attack indicators, including phishing exposure, ransomware-related risks, leaked credentials, dark web exposure, vulnerable internet-facing assets, and other publicly observable security weaknesses,” Onal said. “The goal is not to replace a penetration test or red-team exercise. Instead, it provides an attacker-view snapshot that helps MSSPs quickly identify organizations that may have elevated cyber risk and potentially require additional security services.”
It can also help MSSPs prioritize prospective clients, have more meaningful conversations with them, and focus their resources on organizations that are more highly at risk and more likely to benefit from their expertise.
Bringing AI, Automation to Risk Assessment
It’s part of a larger push by SOCRadar to use automation and AI to make cybersecurity intelligence something that can drive action rather than simply create static alerts. The company last year
unveiled its Agentic Threat Intelligence platform.
Traditional and manual scans often can’t look at, ingest, and quickly evaluate the amount of threat intelligence that an automated platform like Hacker Score can. It takes too long, and because of this, it’s difficult for MSSPs to differentiate themselves in a market that
MSSPs and MSPs continue to struggle with the manual, time-consuming process of conducting initial security assessments for prospects. Standard "scans" often lack the depth of Extended Threat Intelligence (XTI), making it difficult for them to differentiate their services from their competitors and prove the necessity of their security stack in a crowded market.
Greater Visibility
The platform can give MSSPs visibility into the internet-facing assets that their clients or prospects have, and identify employee data that has been exposed in recent breaches or the logs that threat actors place stolen data in. Hacker Score also instantly identifies critical and exploitable vulnerabilities in the infrastructures of prospects and evaluates the levels of risk to their third-party ecosystems, which have become a key target in supply-chain attacks.
“Every vendor relationship brings a
certain degree of risk because, in most cases, these partners require access to your data, systems, or networks to perform their functions,”
EC-Council University wrote last year. “If a vendor’s security posture is weak, cybercriminals can exploit their systems to infiltrate your organization.”
MSSPs Central to SOCRadar
MSSPs are a key focus area for SOCRadar, Onal said. About a third of the company’s revenue is generated through MSSPs and other service providers, and the CEO said he expects that to grow past 60% over the next two years as the vendor expands its partner ecosystem globally.
“While MSSPs use SOCRadar’s threat intelligence, digital risk protection, attack surface management, and dark web monitoring capabilities to protect their customers, we also build solutions specifically designed to help them grow their business,” he said. “Hacker Score is a good example. It helps MSSPs identify opportunities, prioritize outreach, demonstrate value early in the sales cycle, and engage prospects with meaningful security insights before becoming a customer.”
