Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Cybercriminals are sneaky. They know that the weakest link in an organization’s cyber defenses is its supply chain. In fact, supply chain attacks are now the avenue of choice for hackers. Consider the facts.

When choosing a supplier to partner with, organizations need to perform their due diligence and assess the cyber risks associated with each particular supplier using risk assessment evaluations. Part of the supplier lifecycle management process includes ensuring that these third parties are meeting minimum security requirements, maintaining strong cybersecurity programs, and adhering to all relevant compliance regulations.

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.

Waves of change are constantly disrupting companies of all sizes around the world, particularly when it comes to cybersecurity. Digital infrastructure keeps expanding, work models constantly change, and the web between businesses gets more and more intertwined. It’s no surprise that CISOs and risk leaders are evolving. A majority of boards now see cyber risk as business risk, so they’re asking hard questions around risk and exposure.

A lack of direct communication with your fourth-party vendors makes tracking their security risks difficult. Thankfully, there are methods of overcoming this issue to help you remain informed of emerging fourth-party risks to help you easily track emerging fourth-party threats within your Fourth-Party Risk Management program. To learn how UpGuard can help you track your fourth-party risk, click here to request a free trial.

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.

Early 2023 has been characterized by an explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) breakthroughs. Image generators and large language models (LLMs) have captured global attention and fundamentally changed the Internet and the nature of modern work. But as AI / Machine Learning (ML) systems now support millions of daily users, has our understanding of the relevant security risks kept pace with this wild rate of adoption?

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 a security manager, you have a wide variety of tasks you need to complete in order to protect your organization — as well as your employee and customer data. Of course, some of these responsibilities are performed on a quarterly or yearly basis, such as gathering information for audits or conducting annual assessments. But there are certain tasks that you should be completing daily in order to maintain the desired security posture and reduce cyber risk across your expanding attack surface.