News Details

What measures has Morningstar taken to mitigate cyber security risks?

December 19, 2023

One of Morningstar’s most valuable assets is the trust we’ve built with our stakeholders. We recognize our responsibility to safeguard their information and we expend considerable effort and resources to protect all data pertaining to our clients, colleagues, and partners.

Our chief information security officer leads a dedicated team responsible for our comprehensive information security program. The program covers IT risk governance, software and product security, security operations and incident management, IT compliance, technical disaster recovery, and determining enterprise-wide security policies and procedures. The team is responsible for maintaining and implementing Morningstar's Information Security Policies, which define requirements for information classification, appropriate data handling and usage, roles and responsibilities, access controls and provisioning, logging, monitoring, cryptography and key management, security awareness, virus prevention, risk assessments, physical security, mobile device policy, network security, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, and handling of exceptions. Policies are aligned with ISO 27001:2013 and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) SP-800 publications. We regularly benchmark our information security program against NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework to identify our current maturity and measure progress in our program.

Preparedness is a crucial component of our information security and privacy programs. All Morningstar employees undergo annual security awareness training. We also operate a quarterly phishing exercise to educate and test our employees. The security operations team conducts red team exercises to assess any ability to compromise our infrastructure and gain insight into our ability to detect and respond to an attack.

On a business level, we perform quarterly tabletop exercises to prepare stakeholders for security incidents and practice our response procedures. Furthermore, our enterprise resilience team manages both disaster recovery as well as business continuity plans and prepares the firm to recover from high-impact incidents. Should an incident occur, we operate a 24x7 security operations team to respond to security incidents and notify relevant stakeholders.

At the board level, our Audit Committee has oversight of our cybersecurity risk exposures and regularly reviews and discusses risks related to our cybersecurity practices with management.

For more detail please see Morningstar’s Approach to Data and Information Security, available at www.morningstar.com/company/corporate-sustainability-policies-reports. Information on our website is not incorporated by reference into this Report.