Counter third-party risk with continuous vendor monitoring

Assessing a vendor's security posture is not a box that gets checked. The risk of a third-party attack requires the kind of diligence provided by continuous vendor monitoring.

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• Dave Shackleford, Voodoo Security

Third-party risk has quietly become one of the largest and least-predictable attack surfaces. Organizations today rely on hundreds or thousands of vendors for cloud services, software, data processing, logistics and operations, yet many security programs still assess vendor risk once a year using static questionnaires. That model no longer matches the modern threat landscape.

Recent real-world incidents have made the limitations of point-in-time vendor assessments painfully clear. In the 2023 MOVEit file transfer compromise, for example, a single vulnerability in a widely used third-party platform led to mass data breaches across hundreds of organizations, including financial institutions, healthcare providers and government agencies. Many affected customers had previously approved the vendor through ...