An organization must audit its third-party vendors for that question to be answered.
The attack surface expands when organizations bring in a third-party vendor. More than half — 60% — of organizations work with more than 1,000 third parties, according to Gartner research.
With the digital supply chain responsible for 62% of system intrusion incidents in 2022, businesses must do their due diligence before deciding who to work with. Eighty percent of legal and compliance leaders identified third-party risks after initial onboarding and due diligence.
Third-party risk management relies on two main types of surveillance: point-in-time assessment and continuous monitoring. Deploying at least one of these tactics can adequately help protect an organization against third-party vulnerabilities.
What is Point-in-Time Assessment?
Point-in-time assessments evaluate an organization’s security posture at a specific moment in time. It provides a snapshot of the business’s cybersecurity measures, including security controls and vulnerabilities. A typical point-in-time assessment involves reviewing cybersecurity policies, procedures, and responses provided by the third-party vendor.
Organizations use these assessments to evaluate a vendor’s risk before onboarding and repeat them on a certain cadence, whether it’s quarterly or annually. They can also be used for compliance checks or as an internal security review.
While point-in-time assessments can help organizations judge a potential vendor’s risk, the information is only valid at the time of the assessment. This makes point-in-time assessments less expensive, but also less accurate as time goes on.
Security gaps can occur between assessments resulting from new technologies, organizational changes, or the third party working with a new third party. Without ongoing visibility into a vendor’s security posture, an organization cannot accurately assess its real-time security risk, and therefore it increases its risk of exposure.
What is Continuous Attack Surface Monitoring?
Continuous attack surface monitoring is real-time, ongoing assessments of an organization’s security measures and potential vulnerabilities. This type of monitoring continuously discovers, assesses, and mitigates potential risks across an organization’s entire attack surface — including third-party vendors.
Benefits of Continuous Attack Surface Monitoring
Continuous monitoring allows businesses to better understand their security risks, quickly manage and prioritize emerging threats, and strengthen their entire cybersecurity posture. In today’s world of constantly changing threats and emerging vulnerabilities, having always-on attack surface monitoring protects organizations from unwanted security risks.
The dynamic nature of businesses and their data requires risk management that adapts. Continuous attack surface monitoring removes security blind spots that previously occurred between assessments and reduces mean time to repair any threats that emerge.
Continuous Attack Surface Monitoring for Third-Party Vendors
An organization is at risk anytime it allows a third-party into its digital environment. It’s imperative that companies do their own due diligence before bringing a vendor in despite its perceived qualifications, references, and solutions. Determine a third party’s impact on your security before you enter into a contract.
Continuous attack surface monitoring equips organizations with accurate, real-time data on a vendor’s risk, which in turn offers more informed decision-making about vendor relationships and risk mitigation strategies. It’s also a scalable solution — as organizations increase the number of third-party vendors, continuous attack surface monitoring expands to cover the organization’s entire vendor ecosystem.
Without continuous monitoring, breaches can occur. For example, in March 2024, American Express’ third-party merchant processor experienced a security breach, leaking personal data of the financial institution’s customers. Similarly, in July 2024, Healthy Equity, a health savings account provider, experienced a hack of a data repository managed by a third-party vendor.
Continuous monitoring gives organizations a detailed, global view of a vendor’s: Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)
- Data security practices
- Compliance with industry standards
- Vulnerability management
- Incident response capabilities
- Fourth-party risks (risks from a vendors’ own suppliers)
Continuous monitoring is now mandated by some cybersecurity regulators. Regulations have to keep up with attack surfaces multiplying and breaches becoming more common. For example, the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) aims to improve the security of information and communication technology (ICT) for financial services institutions. DORA covers most financial entities and their critical ICT third parties and states that they must continuously monitor and oversee their vendors to ensure compliance with contractual requirements, appropriate risk management, and maintained resilience.
ProcessBolt helps organizations assess and continuously monitor their vendor network efficiently through its fully-integrated vendor risk management platform. The end-to-end platform provides real-time threat intelligence and proactively monitors vendors in real-time to identify adverse changes in their security posture in between assessments.
Get in touch with ProcessBolt’s third-party risk experts to discuss how the latest innovations in attack surface monitoring can be used to prevent third-party breaches.
