Cyber risk is not just a security issue, it’s also a business issue. When security leaders and their businesses don’t see eye to eye, resources get misallocated, expectations aren’t met, and businesses are left unprepared to face threats. SecurityScorecard launched its Cyber Risk Quantification product in April 2022, allowing customers to quantify the financial impact of cyber risk and help facilitate collaboration and communication among business stakeholders.

At a swanky steak house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I sat with 100 other security professionals in a dimly lit wood-panelled room, its walls lined with photographs of famous and near-famous patrons. Nearly all of us were at least one cocktail into our evening of high gustation, storytelling, and network building. (Old Fashioneds were the drink of choice that evening).

New research from the Cyentia Institute found that 98% of organizations do business with a third party that has suffered a breach. The report also found that the average firm has 11 third-party relationships and hundreds of indirect fourth- and nth-party relationships. Bottom line: an expanding attack surface makes companies more prone to cyberattacks.

The SecurityScorecard team has just returned from an exciting week in San Francisco at RSA Conference 2023. This year’s theme, “Stronger Together,” was meant to encourage collaboration and remind attendees that when it comes to cybersecurity, no one goes it alone. Building on each other’s diverse knowledge and skills is what creates breakthroughs.

On average, organizations deploy 47 different cybersecurity solutions and technologies. This puts security, IT, and VRM teams in a difficult position, working with various tools that don’t integrate. One-third of organizations identify “non-integration of security tools” as a major roadblock to getting the total value of their investments.

We’ve entered the fourth and final week of National Supply Chain Integrity Month, an initiative started by CISA and other government agencies to highlight the importance of securing our nation’s most critical systems and ensuring they stay resilient. I started off the month with a post about maturing your third-party risk management program, and followed that up with two more posts dedicated to securing the small business supply chain and streamlining procurement.

The White House’s ambitious national cyber strategy— which represents a shift away from decades-old voluntary compliance guidelines to a more aggressive regulatory approach of critical infrastructure firms—couldn’t come at a better time. A recent study found that local governments were the organizations least capable of disrupting ransomware attacks, and that they were also among the ransomware victims to pay ransoms most frequently (43% paid a ransom after an incident).

As part of SecurityScorecard’s commitment to making the world a safer place, we are now the first and only security ratings platform to integrate with OpenAI’s GPT-4 system. With this natural language processing capability, cybersecurity leaders can find immediate answers and suggested mitigations for high-priority cyber risks.

We’ve entered Week #3 of National Supply Chain Integrity Month, an initiative that CISA and other government agencies started to highlight the importance of securing our nation’s most critical systems and ensuring they stay resilient. For Weeks #1 and #2, I wrote about maturing your third-party risk management program and securing the small business supply chain.

Leading cybersecurity experts Major General John F. Wharton, (US Army ret); Oleg Strizhak, Shell’s Digital Supply Chain Risk Manager; and Sam Curry, the CISO of Zscaler, recently sat down with SecurityScorecard’s President of International Operations Matthew McKenna to discuss how organizations can prepare themselves and their supply chains for zero-day attacks as well as best practices for supply chain risk management.