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How to Stop Cyberattacks from Third Parties?

icon Posted by: Hasan Sameer
icon August 12, 2022

In Brief

What are third-party risks?

A company is associated with a lot of outer entities for various requirements. These entities are vendors, suppliers, partners, contractors, or service providers, who have access to internal company or customer data, systems, processes, or other privileged information. The risks these entities pose to your organization’s ecosystem or supply chain are known as third-party risks. The types of third-party risks may vary according to the aspect of your business they affect. Major third-party risks are Cybersecurity, Operational, Compliance, and Reputational risks.

49%

of organizations experienced a third-party data breach in 2016

59%

was the proportion that the number of third-party data breach victims reached by 2018

16%

is the mere proportion of organizations that are prepared to mitigate third-party attacks.

35%

was the growth rate of these types of attacks between 2017 to 2019

Types of Third-Party Risks You Need to be Aware of

When a business is operational, it is involved with several third-party entities for smooth running. Although it is difficult to anticipate the actual risk parameters coming from the third parties. Methods like Application Penetration Testing work to identify the direct risks. But some third-party risks are still left to find out and mitigate.

Application Penetration Testing

Major third-party risks for an organization

The following are some major third-party risks for an organization:

  1. Intellectual Property (IP) Theft: Ideas, inventions, and creative expressions evolved inside a company are considered intellectual property. Threat actors are always on the hunt to rob key intellectual properties including trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Depending upon the type and domain of business a wide range of utilities can be counted as intellectual property such as inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.
  2. Credentials Theft: Another unlawful third-party act that is quite popular these days. Attackers try to attain the password(s) of an organization or individual to get access and abuse critical data and information. This allows the hackers to operate a cyber-based attack undetected through a network.
  3. Spear Phishing: Often we confuse it with phishing. But spear phishing attacks are quite different than phishing. These attacks target specific organizations or individuals and attempt to steal sensitive data such as account credentials or financial information.
  4. Data Exfiltration: The unauthorized movement of data by threat actors is known as Data Exfiltration. It is a technique that attackers use to target, copy, and transfer sensitive data to fulfill their malicious intentions.
  5. Network Intrusion: Most organizations work on separate digital networks. Infiltration of this network’s parameter with malicious intent is known as Network Intrusion. These attacks generally have the purpose of stealing your valuable network resources and accessing your critical data.

Top 5 Ways to Prevent Your Infrastructure from Third-Party Cyberattacks

Cybersecurity is the answer to all the risks that dwell over your IT infrastructure. Methods like Application Penetration Testing, Software Testing, Network Audits, and Cloud Pen Testing come in handy to tighten the security of your business against cyber-attacks. However, to prevent third-party cyberattacks, you need a bit more. Let’s have a look at certain measures that can help you with it…

  1. Incorporate Risk Management in Your Contract: Although this won’t actually restrain the attacks. But it is among the best practices to minimize the loss. Also, the vendor is held accountable for their weak security posture.
  2. Conduct Thorough Assessments of the Vendors before Onboarding: Onboarding a third-party vendor gives them access to your network resources. Hence, it’s important to vet them before selecting.
  3. Keep an Inventory of Vendors: There are multiple vendors working for one organization’s business. Some of them pose high risk than others. So, keeping an inventory that includes variables like the services you procure from the vendor and the level of access they have to your infrastructure is important.
  4. Issue Risk Questionnaire for Your Vendors: More critical is the service provided by the vendor; more will be the risk posed by them. You can set a risk questionnaire for them using multiple templates online. Moreover, you can ask important questions related to compliance requirements through such a questionnaire.
  5. Devise a Security Scorecard: You should create a security scorecard assigning risk ratings to the vendors. You can rate the vendors based on the threat they pose to the organization.

How RSK can help your business to prevent third-party Cyberattacks?

RSK Cyber Security is among the best Cyber Security Companies UK. It has a lot of services such as Application Penetration Testing, Security Verification, and Infrastructure Security Audits to help your security posture. Our TPCRM (third-party cyber risk management) relies on the fundamentals of monitoring, optimizing, strengthening, and streamlining. We adopt a holistic approach toward protecting your business from all kinds of cyber risks including the ones coming from third parties.

Before You Go!

  • Third-Party Cyber Risk Management needs to be addressed with more sophistication than regular risk management.
  • You need to partner with an expert to maintain the highest level of security with optimum risk prevention to help your business combat these risks.

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