Cyber Risk Monitoring: Steps to Take Now

Building Your Cybersecurity Risk Monitoring Program

We’ve established the importance of monitoring your third-, fourth- and Nth-party vendors for cyber risk. But how do you conceptualize effectively monitor vendors for cyber risk in our increasingly interconnected and complex world? Here are the steps you need to take to build a robust cyber risk monitoring system that can alert you to issues before you fail a compliance audit or experience a data breach.

1. Define Your Level of Acceptable Risk

Every vendor you work with poses a certain level of risk to your organization. It is up to you to define which risks you are comfortable with, and ensure that vendors are given security ratings that accurately reflect the level of risk they pose to your operations and sensitive data. In many cases, you may need to require vendors to reduce their level of risk until their residual risk is acceptable. Take a look at our post on inherent versus residual risk for more information on conceptualizing vendor risk.

2. Utilize Vendor Risk Questionnaires

Vendor Risk Questionnaires are critical for third-party onboarding vendors. Particularly when vendors will have access to sensitive data or when your organization operates under numerous compliance requirements. Vendor Risk Questionnaires may cover topics such as financial health, operational stability, ESG, and other concerns, but cybersecurity is one of the most critical components. Some questions you might consider including:

• Does your organization have any third-party information security certifications such as SOC2, ISO27001, or CMMC?

• Does your organization adhere to a specific cybersecurity framework or model?

• Does your organization have an in-house cybersecurity team or work with an outside IT Service Provider or Managed Security Services Provider?

Using Third-Party Risk Management Software can enable you to quickly and easily create questionnaires based on a library of dozens of customizable templates. For vendors with particularly high-risk profiles or dealing with large amounts of your organization’s sensitive data, you may consider conducting routine vendor assessment questionnaires. Check out our blog on vendor risk assessment questionnaire best practices for more information.

3. Monitor for Data Breaches and Exposed Credentials

Before onboarding a new vendor, be sure to gather information about data breaches they have experienced, including information about affected systems and records – plus remediations and mitigations. Then, be sure to continuously monitor for news and evidence of new data breaches. For instance, dark web scanning is quickly becoming a critical part of third-party risk management. In many cases, organizations will have exposed emails and passwords for sale on the dark web that they are unaware of and could easily lead to a data breach or security incident. Fortunately, specific scanning for exposed credentials is easy and can provide valuable insight into whether the organization has already experienced a data breach or has poor user management practices. Prevalent offers dark web scanning and data breach reporting as part of its vendor risk monitoring solution.

4. Monitor the Vendor When Onsite or When Accessing Your IT Environment

In many cases vendors may require onsite access to IT assets to complete contracted work. However, cybersecurity risk doesn’t stop once the vendor leaves the building. You should ensure that your organization has clear policies in place to govern what access the vendor has to your information technology assets. It is important to remember that vendor mistakes or data breaches can ultimately become your responsibility, especially with specific compliance requirements.

Cyber Monitoring Best Practices

You can reduce your exposure to third-party cybersecurity threats by incorporating these best practices into your program:

Conduct Continuous Third-Party Monitoring

Questionnaire-based cybersecurity assessments are typically completed once or twice a year. Complementing periodic assessments with continuous cyber risk monitoring enables you to stay on top of changes in vendor cyber risk posture as new threats emerge. Monitoring a vendor’s cybersecurity performance also enables you to validate their assessment responses against externally observable evidence of data breaches and other incidents. By implementing a robust third-party risk monitoring solution, you can manage the vendor risk management lifecycle with confidence and respond to security gaps, compliance issues, and potential data breaches before they impact your business.

Scrutinize Past Cybersecurity Performance

The past doesn’t necessarily predict the future, but it can provide insight into how seriously an organization takes cybersecurity. If an organization has experienced numerous data breaches in the recent past, it may serve as a good indicator that your organization's data could become compromised.

Employ the Principle of Least Privilege

You should employ the principle of least privilege for every vendor that you work with. Ensure that they are only provided access to critical systems and data required to perform their work. While the vendor conducts their work, confirm that you have adequate monitoring in place to ensure that they aren’t accessing unnecessary systems or data. Finally, make sure that you have an effective vendor offboarding program in place to revoke access upon completion.

Adapt Your Program Based on Risk Profile

Vendors with robust cybersecurity programs who aren’t dealing with sensitive information may require less monitoring than vendors working with customer information or trade secrets. Be sure to profile, categorize and tier third parties according to their inherent risk during the vendor onboarding process. This will make it easy for you to determine the frequency and scope of risk assessments, as well as the level of monitoring that you need to perform for each vendor. As a result, you will use your resources wisely and scale your cyber monitoring activities to the risk the vendor represents.

Next Steps for Ensuring Third-Party Vendor Cybersecurity

Building an effective cyber risk monitoring program has never been more important. Prevalent makes it easy to manage third-party and fourth-party risk throughout your supply chain. Our vendor risk management platform combines continuous cyber risk monitoring with business, financial and reputation monitoring – coupled with automated vendor risk assessment capabilities for a 360-degree view of vendor risk. Request a demo today to see if Prevalent is a fit for you.