In today’s interconnected business environment, companies regularly rely on third parties for critical business functions like supply chain, IT services, and more. While these relationships can provide efficiency and expertise, they also introduce new cybersecurity risks that must be managed. More than 53% of businesses worldwide have suffered at least one cyber attack in the past 12 months and one in five firms attacked said it was enough to threaten the viability of the business. Recent high-profile breaches like the SolarWinds attack have highlighted the dangers of supply chain compromises. Implementing a comprehensive third party risk management program is essential for security. In this post, we’ll explore key strategies and best practices organizations can use to defend against cyber threats from third party relationships.
Know Your Third Parties and Their Access
The first step is gaining visibility into all of your third party connections. Develop a central repository to track all vendor, supplier, and partner relationships. Document what access each third party has to your systems and data. Identify third parties that have privileged access or handle sensitive data. Prioritize higher risk relationships for additional security review. Maintain an inventory of all third party links so you know who needs to be secured. It has been predicted that in 2024 advancements in AI will fuel a surge in cybercrimes. In addition to text generation, cybercriminals will now have text-to-video or other multi-media creation tools to further their nefarious designs.
Perform Thorough Due Diligence on New Vendors
When bringing on a new third party, conduct in-depth due diligence into their cybersecurity posture. Send third parties a standardized questionnaire covering their security policies, controls, incident response plans, and more. Require them to provide documentation like audits and certifications. Review their physical and application security, encryption methods, employee screening, and other defense capabilities. Conduct interviews with their security staff and leadership. The goal is to confirm the third party takes security as seriously as your organization before establishing connectivity.
Include Security in Contracts and Agreements
Your contracts and agreements with third parties provide leverage for requiring strong security. Include provisions that make them contractually obligated to maintain specific security standards, controls, and practices. Define their responsibilities for security monitoring, vulnerability management, and breach notification. Institute the right to audit their security measures. Specify your security requirements in detail so expectations are clear. Update legacy contracts to reflect modern cyber threats. Enforce security requirements by making them a condition of ongoing business.
Third party risk management is essential in modern interconnected business ecosystems. Businesses can no longer rely solely on their own security – all external connections must be assessed and managed. Implementing continuous due diligence, least privilege access, monitoring, detection, and incident response plans can help limit your exposure.
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Even before the pandemic tested the healthcare systems around the globe to their limits, a 2019 report predicted that the ransomware attacks would grow four-fold between 2017 and 2020, and the industry will most likely pay $65 billion on cybersecurity between 2017 and 2021.
Cybersecurity might not be the top priority when these devices are being designed (even if they are network connected), so their firmware level protection is usually rudimentary.
And with several different device vendors and firmware updates, there are a lot of entryways for hackers.Even if a healthcare facility has a fantastic cybersecurity team/system in place, the workers and doctors are rarely trained to adopt good cybersecurity habits.
Medical training and specialized courses (from nurses to heads of departments, because they all have access to precious medical data) are usually prioritized over security training, so the access of medical personnel often becomes a weak link.There is a severe shortage of cybersecurity professionals with healthcare-relevant training and expertise.
According to a 2020 report, it takes 70% more time to find the right cyber security professional for a healthcare facility than to find someone for other IT jobs.COVID triggered an expedited conversion to the cloud and remote work, especially in the healthcare system.
The financial services industry has seen a prolific rise in the use of applications in the last couple of years.
Globally millions of customers already use a wide range of mobile app services, and it is estimated that the financial application industry will grow at a rate of 30% in the coming years.In 2020 there were 26% more mobile app sessions as compared to 2019.
Using applications for different financial and banking services is a rapid and convenient way to effectively manage your monetary resources like checking balance, transferring funds, paying bills and so on.Financial apps are growing in precedence as several users using smartphones are on the rise.
Also, applications are preferred more as it provides on the go services.But the increase in the use of applications for financial purposes come with a whole new set of cyber security problems.
Security is the principal requirement for an application in the financial industry as a lot of financial resources are at stake.The application industry has still not reached its potential as there are apprehensions among customers, such as app security, data breach, etc.
A good application must primarily provide trust, security and data privacy if they want a considerable number of customers using the application.Since these applications are accessed anywhere from various devices and on numerous channels, there is a need for the financial company to build robust cyber security systems to prevent attacks and threats of any kind.
In this Digital world, the Cybersecurity is becoming an important part to prevent Data Loss, Cyberattacks, Phishing Attacks and Password Theft.
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