Higher education institutions, like colleges and universities, often work with dozens of third-party vendors, which can introduce considerable security risks if the school doesn't maintain a proper vendor risk management (VRM) program. Compromised third parties can pose serious risks to universities, which can expose sensitive data, disrupt business continuity, or incur serious financial damages.
Ransomware is the fast-growing category of cybercrime. It’s estimated that over 4,000 ransomware attacks occur daily. Given the sheer volume of these attacks and the deep attack surface connections between organizations and their vendors, there’s a high likelihood that some of your employee credentials have already been compromised in a ransomware attack, which means the keys to your corporate network could currently be published on a ransomware gang’s data leak site.
Organizations trust third-party vendors to manage large volumes of sensitive customer data, with outsourcing increasing across all industries, including the highly-regulated healthcare sector and financial services. However, service providers don’t necessarily implement the same strict data security standards that these organizations do. Cyber attacks targeting third parties are increasing, according to Gartner.
Data leaks happen when sensitive data or personally identifiable information (PII) is accidentally exposed on the internet or dark web. Typically, data leaks only occur due to poor cyber hygiene, weak network security, or software misconfiguration that can lead to unintended data exposure. Without proper data leak detection processes, cybercriminals and hackers can exploit the exposed data without the organization’s knowledge using open-source intelligence (OSINT).
Cyber vendor risk management (Cyber VRM) is the practice of identifying, assessing, and remediating cybersecurity risks specifically related to third-party vendors. By leveraging data from data leak detection, security ratings, and security questionnaires, organizations can better understand their third-party vendor’s security posture using Cyber VRM solutions.
The technology industry has unlocked innovation across all sectors as an enabler of digital transformation. Most organizations are now outsourcing critical operations to tech companies, such as cloud providers. Tech vendors are now left to manage an ever-growing volume of sensitive data, which they must secure effectively to prevent large-scale data breaches. IBM and Ponemon Institute’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report found a record high average breach cost of US$4.35 million.
In cybersecurity, triage is a cyber incident response approach to identifying, prioritizing, and resolving cybersecurity attacks, threats, and damages within a network. When simultaneous and multiple attacks occur, an IT security team must prioritize which system or device to assess in order to mitigate, remediate, and salvage important devices and data from further damage.
OAuth (pronounced "oh-auth”) is an authorization framework that allows an application to request “secure delegated access” to third-party systems on behalf of the apps’ users or the “resource owner.” Simply put, with OAuth, users can grant websites and applications access to their information on other websites without providing important credentials like passwords. OAuth stands for "Open Authorization”.
During the Vendor Risk Management process, information is in constant flux. From risk assessments to risk remediation processes, communication involving sensitive security control data continuously flows between an organization and its monitored vendors. If intercepted, this information stream could be used as open source intelligence for a third-party data breach campaign, nullifying the very efforts a VRM program is trying to mitigate.
The vulnerabilities perforating the global supply chain have remained dormant for many years. But the violent disruptions of the pandemic finally pushed these risks to the surface, revealing the detrimental impacts of their exploitation to the world.
The financial industry is no stranger to data breaches. Financial institutions have access to millions of personally identifiable information (PII) records, which they must secure to the highest standard. The value of this data is open knowledge – hackers will actively search for existing cybersecurity weaknesses to gain unauthorized access to customers’ financial information.
NIST Special Publication 800-171 (NIST SP 800-171 or NIST 800-171) is a set of security controls within the NIST Cybersecurity Framework that establishes baseline security standards for federal government organizations. NIST SP 800-171 is mandatory for all non-government organizations operating with federal information systems.
Cyber VRM is the practice of identifying, assessing, and remediating the cybersecurity risks of third-party vendors. This involves combining objective, quantifiable data sources like security ratings and data leak detection with subjective qualitative data sources like security questionnaires and other security evidence to get a complete view of your third-party vendors’ security posture. A Cyber VRM solution facilitates this practice.
The technology industry is at the forefront of digital transformation, enabling all other industries to achieve greater operational capabilities and connectivity through innovative solutions. Tech companies, such as SaaS vendors, provide crucial software infrastructure to hundreds or even thousands of other organizations. These vendors access, store and transmit large volumes of sensitive information, including valuable healthcare and finance data.
Data governance is a broad term that refers to the strategy of managing availability, usability, standard compliance, consistency, data integrity, and data security in organizations and companies. While the term is notorious for escaping definitions, data governance is often defined as the first essential branch of data management strategy.
NIST SP 800-161 revision 1 outlines a cybersecurity framework for mitigating security risks in the supply chain. NIST SP-800-161 is a subset of NIST 800-53, a broader cyber risk mitigation framework that’s foundational to most cybersecurity programs. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) designed NIST 800-161 to improve cyber supply chain risk management for all U.S federal agencies.
Organizations must implement effective account protection measures or put themselves at heightened risk of data breaches and other serious cyber attacks, such as ransomware injections. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a crucial component of any organization’s cybersecurity program. MFA adds an additional layer of security, helping prevent hackers from gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data.
The HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) is a security assessment framework in the form of a questionnaire that’s specifically designed for higher education institutions to measure vendor risk. HECVAT attempts to standardize higher education information security and data protection requirements for cloud service providers and third-party solutions, specifically for their consistency, compatibility, and ease of use.
NIST Special Publication 800-53 sets an exemplary standard for protecting sensitive data. Though originally designed for government agencies, the framework has become a popular inclusion in most security programs across a wide range of industries.
Global information technology (IT) spending on devices, data center systems/software, and communications services reached $4.26 trillion in 2021 and is expected to increase to around 4.43 trillion U.S. dollars at the end of 2022. With this new, skyrocketing growth, organizations face complex new compliance and IT security challenges in how data and information are stored.
Cybersecurity audits are essential for any organization to review, analyze, and update its current IT infrastructure, information security policies (ISP), and overall cybersecurity risk management protocols. Audits are a critical part of information security and should be performed annually to ensure that new policies are implemented properly, potential vulnerabilities are identified, and the school maintains compliance with regulatory standards.
The risk of a data breach is exceptionally high for financial organizations. Hackers recognize the high value financial data has on the dark web. Other cybercriminals pay significant amounts to get their hands on customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) and commit lucrative cybercrimes, like identity theft and insurance fraud. One of the most common ways cybercriminals gain access to this data is by exploiting data leaks.
The rapid increase of cybersecurity challenges in recent years, such as growing ransomware attacks, has forced the US to devise new mandatory regulations. These requirements are aimed to help combat cybercrime by increasing organizations’ level of cybersecurity capabilities. Complying with these regulations is necessary to keep organizations accountable for their mandatory security posture.
Third-party breaches have become a common phenomenon in the modern cyber threat landscape. In 2021, the Ponemon Insitute estimated that 51% of organizations were impacted by third-party breaches. The 2022 report found that data breach damage costs associated with third-party vulnerabilities rose from US$ 4.33 million in 2021 to US$ 4.55 million in 2022.
Let’s face it, information technology experts are usually not enthusiastic writers. So when it comes to creating an executive report, cybersecurity staff aren’t exactly pushing each other over to get this exciting writing task complete. Instead, it keeps getting delayed, day by day, until the night before its submission. Many get stuck on the executive summary section, obsessing over its perfection.
Data leaks occur when organizations fail to implement proper cybersecurity measures, causing sensitive data and other personally identifiable information (PII) to be exposed to the public. In most cases, data leaks occur due to internal human errors, an oversight by the IT committee, or a lack of strong security practices.
Large-scale data breaches are flooding headlines, as major security incidents like ransomware and supply chain attacks become more strategic by the day. Organizations that fail to address their cybersecurity blindspots in such a volatile threat landscape will inevitably suffer a data breach.
