Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Are you confident your vendors can withstand a cyber attack? If not, you should continuously evaluate your third-party security, especially if you’re sharing sensitive customer data across your vendor ecosystem. In this post, we break down the concepts of third-party security and provide an actionable roadmap for effectively strengthening this essential branch of cybersecurity across your organization.

Your vendors are essential partners, but they could also be your organization's biggest hidden security risk. A robust vendor review process is the key to ensuring onboarded vendors align with your cybersecurity standards and don't increase your likelihood of suffering a data breach. This guide outlines everything you need to know to build a structured, repeatable, and scalable vendor security review process.

The explosion of generative artificial intelligence tools is sparking a wave of enthusiasm in workplaces, with employees eagerly embracing new applications to boost productivity and innovation. However, this adoption often leads to a new phenomenon known as shadow AI—the use of artificial intelligence tools within an organization without explicit approval or oversight from IT and security teams. Unsanctioned use of AI creates significant (and often invisible) security blind spots.

Similar to Ollama and llama.cpp, LlamaIndex provides an application layer for connecting your data to LLMs and interacting with it through a chat interface. While LlamaIndex is an open source project like other LLM application frameworks, LlamaIndex is also a company, with a recent Series A, a commercial offering, and a more polished aesthetic than their strictly DIY counterparts.

Today, the average employee juggles dozens of SaaS apps—each requesting access with a quick click. But how many employees check whether those permissions (granted in moments to boost productivity) might be unlocking sensitive company data? While businesses thrive on the agility and collaboration SaaS tools provide, this convenience can create a frequently overlooked web of user-granted permissions.

Organizations are still struggling to manage vendor-related cyber risk effectively. According to a recent study by Imprivata and the Ponemon Institute, nearly half of organizations fall victim to data breaches involving third-party network access. This isn't just another statistic. It's a critical cybersecurity issue hinting at broader limitations of traditional TPRM programs.

By now we’re all familiar with the capabilities of generative AI for creating images. For some tasks, like casting an existing image in a recognizable art style, it works well. Much more than that and it encounters limitations: complex prompts often don’t return exactly what you imagined and iterating on a failed prompt can quickly become time-consuming.

Online fraud remains a significant and rapidly expanding threat in today's cyber threat landscape. According to the FTC, consumers in the U.S. lost a staggering $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% surge from the previous year. The most commonly reported category? Imposter scams. This difficult-to-intercept form of fraud alone accounted for $2.95 billion of those losses.

Today, the average phishing email that lands in your CEO's inbox is flawless. It uses perfect grammar, contains an intimate understanding of your organization’s current business landscape, and ends with an urgent, contextually relevant request. This isn't the work of a typical cybercriminal; it's the hallmark of generative AI being weaponized, transforming social engineering from a numbers game into a targeted strike.

Picture this: your vendor’s latest security audit just landed in your inbox, and you spot multiple failure points. What’s your immediate action plan? Failed vendor audits are an uncomfortable but increasingly common reality as reliance on third-party vendors grows, and handling them poorly can lead to data breaches, costly compliance violations, and serious operational disruptions. Knowing how to respond effectively isn't just good practice—it's essential risk management.