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Who Can Be Third-Party VendorsThird-party vendors are all entities (usually other companies) that your company does business with in any capacity. Your suppliers, your outside IT support partners, a marketing agency that you employ either on a permanent basis or for one-off projects, an accounting firm you employ, etc. In the modern business world, often times these third-party vendors gain temporary access to certain parts of your cyber system. For instance, you might allow a marketing agency to gain access to the server where your website is hosted, from where it is possible to access all kinds of other data that pertains to your company and your customers. When we are talking your outside IT partners, they usually have limitless access to the majority of your company data and systems. Third-party vendor data breaches are extremely common and according to recent research by Soha Systems, almost two-thirds of all cybersecurity breaches can be traced to third-party vendors. In a great article from Security Scorecard, you can find descriptions of a number of major third-party vendor breaches from 2016. It provides a great overview of the different ways in which attackers use third-party vendors to access data belonging to some of world's largest companies and organizations. Protecting Your CompanyProtecting your company from third-party vendor-related cybersecurity breaches can be done, but it will require quite a bit of work and meticulous planning and executing.
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If your third-party vendors have access to your corporate data, then your
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A way to add yet another layer of security to your third-party vendor relationships is to stay in touch with them and their security people. For companies that use intranet, this will be very easy as you will be able to simply include their people in all of your cybersecurity correspondence, making sure they have access to all important guidelines and documents.
You should also ask them to give you regular updates on how they are handling things on their end, whether they are regularly updating their security systems and practices and whether they are noticing any strange things happening.
These open lines of communication will come in particularly handy should they suffer a breach. This way, you will be informed immediately and you will be able to start closing all potential avenues of attack coming from them to your system.
Closing Word
Third-party vendors are an essential part of any corporate cybersecurity ecosystem and you need to remember this at all times. That being said, with some smart practices and extra effort, you can reduce the chances of suffering such a breach dramatically.
Make sure to do it.
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