Collaboration with third parties enables organizations to boost productivity and efficiency, generate better products and services, hire better skills, and save expenses. However, all of these advantages come at the cost of heightened cybersecurity concerns.
The 2022 Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Industry Study by Prevalent, Inc. seeks to investigate current trends, problems, and initiatives affecting third-party risk management practitioners across the globe. According to the report, 45% of companies had a third-party security issue in the previous year. Furthermore, 69% of respondents feel that a data breach is the most severe third-party risk.
Also Read: Five Key Steps to Improve Third-Party Risk Management
Using four best practices that work together to establish a layered, robust, adaptable, and effective information security defense, many threats may be minimized. Among these practices are:
Avoid unauthorized commands and errors
A third-party user may be required to access systems utilizing a highly privileged, super-user account, such as root or admin, for technical or administrative reasons. With such unrestricted access, that individual may wreak enormous harm, whether malicious or unintentionally. Using a Privileged Access Management (PAM) system to offer fine-grained permission restrictions is better and more acceptable.
CISOs can allow users to have sessions facilitated on their behalf to numerous target systems using several distinct accounts, each with differing permission levels, utilizing a PAM system.
Leveraging blacklists and whitelists to filter commands may give a lot of control and flexibility. A blacklist comprises orders that cannot be issued, whereas a whitelist contains instructions that can.
Facilitate continuous user activity tracking
Many IT policies, legislation, and standards call for the continuous monitoring of user activities. CISOs can identify activities that critical assets are used for by evaluating third-party vendors’ activities within the network.
CISOs must seek a system that can scrutinize and record user sessions in a specific format that can be used to audit the activities of their third-party providers. Vendor monitoring reports will help pass external audits, assess their cybersecurity during internal audits, and investigate cybersecurity problems.
Also Read: Three Steps to Build a Robust Third-Party Risk Management Program in 2022
Create a system for onboarding and off boarding vendors
It is critical to have a consistent onboarding process for suppliers, much as organizations have an onboarding procedure for new personnel to make them mindful of their company standards. CISOs will want to ensure that suppliers understand their information security standards/policies and commit to following them during the onboarding process.
For example, if a vendor intends to have employees execute work on their behalf on their devices, they must express their “Bring Your Own Device” rules on what data the vendor may and cannot keep on such devices.
Conduct frequent audits
Third-party vendor audits and assessments should be performed regularly by CISOs. They should examine how their vendors treat their essential systems and sensitive data using reports from their user activity monitoring solution and incident response system.
CISOs must also conduct periodic evaluations utilizing vendor risk management questionnaires. They can create their questionnaires, including using templates tailored to their company’s needs. CISOs can evaluate their suppliers’ cybersecurity measures and detect possible gaps by having them fill out questionnaires.
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