Cyber supply chain risk management (C-SCRM) best practices for 2022

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Cyber supply chain risk management (C-SCRM) is the process of identifying, understanding, and mitigating cyber risks that threaten your organisation’s extended supply chain. Managing cyber risk within your supply chain includes taking precautionary measures to secure your organisation against attacks, as well as mitigating the risk of third-party breaches that can disrupt business.

Ransomware attacks, third-party data breaches, and other cyberattacks are becoming more and more common. And as supply chains expand across the globe so do the risks. Many large-scale organisations today tend to invest in comprehensive security programs but ensuring the extended supply chain remains secure still proves extremely challenging. Therefore, it’s not only important to gain visibility into your third-party security controls, but also the controls used by fourth, fifth and other parties further down the supply chain.

Getting to grips with C-SCRM can help your organisation choose vendors that take compliance and cybersecurity seriously and help you make educated and informed decisions. Here we take a closer look at cyber-supply chain risk management and share best practices for enhancing supply chain resilience and for reducing risk in 2022.

Vendor risk questionnaires and repositories

Providing suppliers with vendor risk questionnaires gives a certain level of visibility into their cyber security controls and reduces the risk of violating compliance requirements. Vendor questionnaires must be tailored to take into account profiled risk and mapping answers to cybersecurity regulations applicable to your organisation. Formulating vendor questionnaires in this specific way can speed up vendor due diligence while simultaneously reducing cybersecurity and compliance risk.

Questionnaires can also be segmented based on industry. For example, a software vendor will require a different questionnaire to an onsite heating contractor. The correct use of vendor risk questionnaires can streamline vendor onboarding, simplify compliance, and provide an insight into the extended supply chain. What’s more, utilising a third-party risk management platform can reduce the time to gauge third-party vendors and simplify processes.

Profiled, inherent and residual vendor risk

Vendor risk can come in many different shapes and guises so understanding the different types can help your organisation make data-based decisions on how to apply vendor risk questionnaires and how to compare vendors based on measurable risk. This can be broken down into the following:

Profiled risk

Profiled risk relates to the risk based on the service that the contractor is providing. For example, a managed service provider poses far more risk to your organisation than a heating company.

Inherent risk

Inherent risk is the amount of risk a third-party vendor poses prior to implementing security controls required by your organisation.

Residual risk

The residual risk is the amount of risk or danger associated with an action or event remaining after natural or inherent risks have been reduced by risk controls.

Incorporate security requirements within contracts

Organisations are able to mandate cybersecurity controls within contracts with any external party. Service-level agreements and other contractual terms can require third, fourth and any other parties associated with the company to legally obligate themselves to maintain or incorporate cybersecurity controls around your organisation’s data.

Continuous monitoring

Once a vendor has been onboarded, continuous third-party monitoring is key. Organisations often change their cybersecurity posture in the middle of a partnership so it’s important to ensure you keep on top of any changes at all times. Without continuous monitoring, your risk management program can be out-of-date when it comes to a vendor’s current cybersecurity posture which increases the threat level significantly.

A robust cyber risk monitoring solution will provide intelligence from onion pages, dark web special access forums, criminal forums, paste sites, threat feeds, security communities, vulnerability databases, code repositories, and other sources.

Maintain due diligence during offboarding

Vendor due diligence, risk questionnaires, and mapping compliance requirements can take up a lot of time and money, but many organisations forget to plan for the end of the business partnership. Vendor offboarding is just as important as onboarding. If your organisation fails to successfully offboard vendors, forgets to destroy sensitive data or revoke IT access, it can lead to a great many problems down the line. Compliance issues become evident if a contract has expired but the vendor still has access to IT systems, data breaches can occur if the vendor has stored personal information of customers, and insider threats remain if departing employees or contractors are left with access to systems and sensitive data.

Get in touch with RiskXchange to find out more about supply chain risk management (C-SCRM).

How RiskXchange can help

RiskXchange is one of the firms leading the fight against cybercrime, coming up with novel solutions to everyday problems experienced at the hands of hackers.

With full visibility over your eco-systems’ entire attack surface in near real-time, you can regularly monitor and mitigate risks to prevent unnecessary exposures. Our passive data collection methods are effective and have no impact on your network performance. Using data-driven insights to prevent breaches is the best way to reduce an attack surface and prevent cyberattacks. 

About RiskXchange

RiskXchange provides a powerful AI-assisted, yet simple automated and centralised 360-degree cybersecurity risk rating management approach. We generate objective and quantitative reporting on a company’s cyber security risk and performance, which enables organisations with evolving business requirements to conduct business securely in today’s open and collaborative digital world. 

RiskXchange is an information security technology company, which helps companies of all sizes fight the threat of cyber threats by providing instant risk ratings for any company across the globe. RiskXchange was founded and is led by recognised experts within the security industry, who have held leading roles within companies such as IBM Security. 

Find out more here.