Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Security teams are struggling to contend with the expanding third-party attack surface which is fueled by the pernicious cycle of poor vendor risk management.

The Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) is the European Union’s attempt to streamline the third-party risk management process across financial institutions. A draft of DORA was published by the European Commission on 24 September 2020. Without this act, there isn't an objective Information and Communication Technology (ICT) risk management standard in Europe.

No organization is impervious to cyberattacks. But what separates resilient businesses from data breach victims is superior risk management. Resilience is achieved through the meticulous calculation of all potential risks and the application of necessary control measures to mitigate them. In this post, we present a 4-step framework for a reliable risk management plan.

SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is an open standard that enables users to access numerous web applications or web services using the same login credentials through identity federation. SAML relies upon two parties - an identity provider (IDP) and a service provider (SP). The IDP provides authentication information about the user to the SP. The SP uses this information to provide authorization to the user.

Vendor tiering is a method of classifying vendors based on the level of security risk they introduce to an organization. The level of security criticality decreases with each subsequent level. The number of tiering levels depends on personal preference. The basic vendor tiering structure consists of three levels - Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, where Tier 1 represents high-risk vendors. Each vendor could be assigned to a tier manually, or the process could be based on a security questionnaire scoring system.

A botnet is a network of malware-infected devices used to launch coordinated attacks either against a single target, like during a DDoS attack, or multiple targets like during email phishing attacks. All infected machines in a botnet are remotely controlled by a single cyber attacker that could be located anywhere in the world.

UpGuard Summit is UpGuard’s quarterly virtual event where we discuss the future of cybersecurity with security leaders across the globe. During the latest UpGuard Summit, on August 18, 2021, some exciting announcements were made about new and upcoming features. The details are summarized below.

Privilege escalation is the exploitation of a programming error, vulnerability, design flaw, configuration oversight or access control in an operating system or application to gain unauthorized access to resources that are usually restricted from the application or user. This results in the application or user having more privileges than intended by the developer or system administrator, allowing attackers to gain access to sensitive data, install malware and launch other cyber attacks.

ISO/IEC 27001 is the leading international standard for regulating data security through a code of practice for information security management. Its creation was a joint effort of two prominent international standard bodies - the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This is why the standard is formally prepended with ISO/IEC, though "IEC" is commonly left to simplify referencing.

Third-party risk is any risk brought on to an organization by external parties in its ecosystem or supply chain . Such parties may include vendors, suppliers, partners, contractors, or service providers, who have access to internal company or customer data, systems, processes, or other privileged information. While an organization may have strong cybersecurity measures in place and a solid remediation plan, outside parties, such as third-party vendors , may not uphold the same standards.