Analyst Insight: The Gartner® Market Guide for IT Vendor Risk Management Solutions
Last week, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced they had credible evidence of a cyber threat to US hospitals. The Russia-based attack utilizes the Trickbot botnet to deliver highly infectious Ryuk ransomware. It has already impacted at least five US hospitals, resulting in their networks being taken offline.
Healthcare organizations typically rely on hundreds of third parties to deliver critical supporting services. Third-party vulnerabilities can severely jeopardize patient care, so it’s essential for hospitals to have a process for identifying, analyzing and mitigating such risks.
In this post, I’ll share five steps that healthcare organizations can take to identify and close third-party security gaps. I’ll also discuss the importance of infusing risk analysis with cybersecurity intelligence to proactively spot ransomware risks.
Here are five things your healthcare organization can do to identify, manage and reduce third-party exposure to ransomware and other threats:
Let’s expand on step 5. It’s essential to regularly assess vendor internal security controls, but these assessments typically only happen annually – and a lot can change in a year. Continuously monitoring your vendors for cyber exposures can help you to stay ahead potential attacks year-round.
There are two ways to access continuous cyber intelligence: the hard, manual way and the easy, automated way. You can look to a multitude of sources for vendor intelligence:
The challenge doesn’t lie in finding cyber intelligence, it’s in ingesting, analyzing and prioritizing it so it’s understandable and actionable. That’s how you get from risk identification to risk mitigation.
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Part of the Prevalent Third-Party Risk Management Platform, Vendor Threat Monitor (VTM) gathers and centralizes vendor threat intelligence from thousands of sources. Using contextual machine learning, VTM then correlates monitoring data with assessment results for more holistic and current risk visibility.
By unifying vendor monitoring and assessment, Prevalent significantly streamlines third-party risk identification, analysis and response activities by:
The Ryuk ransomware attack against healthcare providers was unconscionable, especially during a pandemic. Now is the time to make sure your third parties are able to prevent or mitigate these attacks. For more on how Prevalent can help, download the white paper, 5 Steps to Healthcare Third-Party Risk Success or request a demo a demo today.
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