The purpose of vendor risk management is to strike a delicate balance between facilitating the needs of the business by integrating new vendors and ensuring that those same business partners don’t exceed the organization’s risk appetite. Maintaining a healthy balance between those two interests requires leaders to always consider broader business goals when executing VRM strategies.

Ransomware has traditionally revolved around the encryption of victims’ files. But even if encryption remains ransomware groups’ most common approach, it isn’t really their priority–extortion is. Financially-motivated cybercriminals care more about extracting payment from their victims than they do about the particular methods used to achieve that goal.

The spotlight on cyber risk quantification (CRQ) has raised its status to the top of the hypercycle, but with fame comes scrutiny and criticism. Security analysts and practitioners debate the validity of each model framework, along with the data used when modeling cyber risk. Despite this debate, there is a unifying consensus that knowing the possible range of the financial impact of a cyber event is far more optimal than flying blind.

Cybersecurity is a team sport, and SecurityScorecard is proud to partner with the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to share cyber threat information in defense of public and private critical infrastructure.

According to the latest IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average breach costs $4.35M per incident, climbing by 12.7% from 3.86 million USD in IBM’s 2020 report. This does not account for lost business opportunities and lingering reputational damage. A cybersecurity tabletop exercise could substantially reduce this amount simply by having a well-thought-out incident response plan and effectively exercising business continuity plans.

The August 4th compromise of Twilio via a targeted smishing attack has been a topic of wide concern and discussion on social media. My first thoughts on hearing of the attack were to virtually “pat myself down” with regard to exposure risk. Kind of like that feeling when you’re not sure if your car keys or wallet are in your pocket a few blocks after walking away from your parking space. Is my company affected by the breach? Did we receive a notification email from them?

The BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware is a complex threat written in Rust that appeared in November 2021. In this post, we describe a real engagement that we recently handled by giving details about the tools, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by this threat actor. Firstly, the attacker targeted an unpatched Microsoft Exchange server and successfully dropped webshells on the machine.

According to a Gartner report, 60 percent of organizations work with more than 1,000 third parties that connect to their internal systems, and nearly 58 percent of organizations believe they have incurred a vendor-related breach. Many third parties require more access to organization data assets and are increasingly working with their own third parties, further multiplying the size and complexity of the third-party network.

The concept of storing sensitive data in the cloud was once seen as ludicrous. Now, businesses are moving into cloud security at an exponential rate with the promise of larger storage space, lower costs, and improved performance. However, with such great benefits come severe risks.

In Spring 2022, Lincoln College announced that it would permanently close on May 13 and noted that a December 2021 ransomware attack had contributed to its closure.