Law360, New York ( October 21, 2015, 10:27 AM EDT) -- Rating agencies (e.g., Moody's, Standard & Poor's, Fitch Ratings) provide credit ratings. The credit ratings are not only issued regularly to countries or specific classes of individual securities such as corporate bonds, but to individual companies. Among other things, these ratings measure and forecast a company's ability to meet its responsibilities with respect to all of its issued securities, thus helping potential and current investors assess the risk of investing in a specific company. The rating agencies arrive at their ratings by considering a number of the factors that influence a company's financial health and influence the likelihood of timely debt repayment, including economic, regulatory and political influences, management and corporate governance attributes, and the company's competitive position. The rating agencies have begun waking up to the reality that one new and increasingly important factor that can dramatically impact a company's value is cyber risk. Increasingly, rating agencies now recognize and understand that, depending on the company, cyber risk represents a very real risk vector that should be incorporated into the ratings issued by the rating agencies....