Third-party risk management (TPRM), also known as “vendor risk management” is the process of managing risks introduced to your business by your organization’s vendors, suppliers, contractors, and service providers. Any outside party that plays a significant part in your company’s ecosystem or supply chain is considered a third-party vendor.

Many businesses are shifting workloads to the cloud in an effort to increase efficiency and streamline workloads. In fact, according to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, roughly 90% of enterprises anticipate cloud usage will expand even further as a result of COVID-19. While cloud computing can offer organizations a competitive advantage, it is important not to rush into cloud adoptions without understanding the risks involved as well.

SecurityScorecard’s Investigations & Analysis team conducted an investigation into the details surrounding the USAID.gov attack. As has been previously reported, the attack has been potentially attributed to the organization commonly known as Cozy Bear, but our investigation found that the campaign is likely much larger, and began much earlier than has been reported.

The data privacy regimes in Russia, China, and the United States are very different from the regimes elsewhere. The financial lure of selling to, or processing data on, EU residents is strong, which has led other countries to adopt the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or something like it. Russia, China, and the United States are large enough for other forces to dominate, including the desire to have their citizens’ data stored locally, as we’ll see.

Corporate cybersecurity professionals must be on constant alert to avoid the wide range of cyberattacks that can be thrown at them today: malware, ransomware, trojan horses, social engineering, and spear-phishing attacks, to name just a few. Among the most serious of attacks is the advanced persistent threat (APT). An APT is an attack that uses sophisticated methods to gain access to information systems and sensitive information.

One of the key reasons SecurityScorecard commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study was to help the market move on from using spreadsheets as a Vendor Risk Management (VRM) tool. The primary reason for IT teams to look at SecurityScorecard or any other VRM automation platform is simple. IT (Information Technology) will help IT teams get better leverage on their two rarest commodities in the security world, time and talent.

It’s the stuff of IT managers’ nightmares and it is coming to a server near you: ransomware attacks, phishing schemes, privacy breaches, and other yet-to-be imagined cyber threats aiming to pilfer the sensitive data stored on your IT systems. Cybercriminals target large companies like Microsoft, Equifax, Expedia, and Barnes & Noble just to mention a few big victims from 2020.

Cybersecurity is more than “just” technology these days. With legislative bodies increasingly writing more laws, technology and legal terminologies have become more intertwined than ever before. As organizations build cyber risk strategies, they need to understand risk mitigation’s underlying goal. This is why understanding the difference between due care and due diligence is important to how you set your risk mitigation strategies.

Businesses sit on massive, ever-growing piles of data. According to Dave Reinsel, senior vice president, IDC's Global DataSphere, 64.2 zettabytes (ZB) of data was created or replicated in 2020. And the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage. But data isn’t just growing, it is spreading to more applications, more users, and more devices than ever.

Penetration testing, also known as “pen testing,” is an intentional, simulated cyberattack against your IT systems to find vulnerabilities and test the efficacy of cybersecurity controls. For example, penetration testers can use this tactic to improve web application security mechanisms such as firewalls. Pen testing might involve an attempt to breach access controls to gain access to a private network.