Tis the season! Third party risk will never be the same. Why is it that cyber thieves, aka hackers, are more active around the holidays? Around Halloween each year, information security professionals begin the process of bracing for the inevitable onslaught of bad actors attempting to perform a successful business email compromise (BEC) or a corporate account takeover. BEC revolves around a bad actor gaining control of an email account which results in money being wired from a business’ bank account to a fraudulent bank account controlled by a bad actor.
Corporate account takeovers are usually executed by a bad actor farming enough information about a business or a high net worth individual to gain access to their bank account, and again, wire the money to an offshore account. At the same time, massive numbers of consumers go online to shop! For all these reasons, it’s a great time to do another vendor cyber risk check-in.
Online shopping overtook sales in stores in February this year while cybercrime is literally costing the world billions every year. You can see where this is going. Right? It doesn’t end well. Today, internet gold isn’t just found in Bitcoins. It’s found in the bank accounts and debit/credit cards of everyone who has a bank account or a debit/credit card. Businesses worldwide are under siege from cyberthieves working day and night to invent new ways to access data and turn that data into dollars. Consumers worldwide are at risk of falling prey to fraudulent experiences and both the consumer and their credit card company lose money.
Like the rising tide raising all boats, third party risk also rises during this time of year. And, don’t forget about the fourth party risk…Let’s just say failure to properly manage all your vendors and all your vendor’s vendors can lead to your organization becoming a Fox News moment and yet another statistic in the fight against cybercrime.
So, what do you do? Ramp up ongoing monitoring. We often refer to ongoing monitoring as the forgotten pillar of vendor management. When it comes to cybercrime, forgetting this pillar is not the best place to find yourself during the holidays.
It’s critical to monitor your vendors’ cyber preparedness with SSAE 18 SOC report reviews and, if needed, you can utilize monitoring services like Security Scorecard to get an idea of how secure your vendors are when handling your data or your customer’s data. These reports are part of the big picture.
If the SOC reports or the security monitoring service are giving you information that causes you to pause, then you need to take the following five steps for your critical and high-risk vendors to keep Santa from leaving you a lump of coal.
You must wonder why bad actors love the holiday season. It’s simple really. We are all human. We all have sleepless nights and things that happen in our personal lives that can distract us. A distracted employee can click on the wrong link in an email or forget to properly authenticate someone calling in to move funds from one account to another. All of us have clicked on an email that we shouldn’t have or taken a website redirection we shouldn’t have. Today, that can lead to ransomware, corporate account takeover or a business email compromise. During the holidays there are more distractions for us and more opportunity for the bad actors.
You simply can’t cover all the bases by yourself. You’re going to need help to keep the money in the right hands. Educating your employees and checking in on your vendors is key.
Yes, this is meant to be an informative blog on how to check-in on your vendors this time of the year and why; however, I think it’s helpful to share some general security tips:
We all need to be extra cautious all year, but especially this time of the year – vendors, organizations, customers.
Proactively prepare for vendor data breaches to safe guard your organization. Download the infographic.