Enterprise Cybersecurity - Aligning Third Parties And Supply Chain

Over the last five years, the cybersecurity market has risen exponentially, forecasted to be estimated at $403 billion by 2027. While such a surge is happening, multiple corporate organizations are working tirelessly to identify the sources of potential threats and vulnerabilities. One of the significant aspects of these sources includes third-party vendors and supply chains essential for your business.

As reported by Forbes, 80% of senior IT security leaders believe that they lack protection against cyberattacks despite increased investments. Dealing with remote work challenges and a distributed IT team has added to these difficulties. The rate of cyberattacks has increased meteorically ever since. Additionally, it is estimated that the cost devoted to cybercrime would be more than $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

Why is Third-Party Risk Management Essential to Cybersecurity?

Looking at recent cybersecurity attacks at Magecart and Atrium Health Data Breach, it becomes imperative for enterprises to focus on their risk management. Everything from third-party risk assessments to multifactor authentication requires a complete revolution of how third parties and suppliers work.

Evolving the risk management strategies to strengthen your organizational cybersecurity becomes the next big step to undertake. The two significant aspects where organizations struggle when it comes to enhancing security are visibility and control. Enterprises don't often have the complete picture of how much their third-party vendors have access or control. According to HIPAA, the healthcare provider is directly responsible for the data breach, even if it happens on the third-party vendors' end. Patient's or any client's data is solely the responsibility of an organization.

What Can You Do to Align Third-Party and Supply Chains to Ensure Security?

The first step of strengthening your third-party risk management program is building efficient relationships with your supply chain vendors. This step is crucial for the following steps to fall in line. Even the best-run programs might have loopholes and scope for a data breach, and hence you must have an idea to prevent as much as possible.

Learning from one of the data breaches in SolarWinds, it is apparent that these breaches can be aimed at anyone. The security vendors were targeted during the attack, making it all the more impactful.

You need to arrange and conduct security reviews for your products and address that to customers according to the state of vulnerability. This will allow you to determine the areas which are more vulnerable to attacks, and it will enable you to do a better risk assessment

The next step is to use threat modeling to develop better products and share the outcomes with customers. It would help you to considered scenarios for different kinds of attacks. Emphasize the denial of services as well as those addressing potentially compromised assets.

Expand and innovate your code-testing abilities (general, dynamic, and static security testing) to cover testing on tampering of the code, data integrity degradation, and corporate integration suitability.

Enterprises need to demand more testing for mandating better controls and start investing in the testing business. Also, you need to arrange red-team exercises involving existing and potential attack scenarios on the software supply chain for current products.

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