Typically, Organizations Go To Free Services And Tools When They Don’t Have Enough Financial Resources, Buy Security Tools, Hire Specialists, Or Outsource Some Tasks One Step Higher.

For Example, They May Use Cloud Services Or Software Provided By Larger Companies To Reduce Costs Or Benefit From Third-Party Vendor Services.

Economically outsourcing work is indeed an efficient solution to improve productivity and tackle the limitations of organizational resources. Still, it poses many security risks, as you have to share your data with individuals or companies that you do not know how they work. For example, these companies may not use robust, integrated, and up-to-date solutions. So that hackers can easily access and misuse this information or falsify information. For this reason, third-party vendors play a role in a large number of information intrusions, either directly or indirectly.

Statistics show that nearly 80 percent of the world’s organizations have experienced at least one information intrusion caused by third-party system vulnerabilities.

While the damage caused by security intrusions is high, organizations still do not take the security risks of receiving services from third-party vendors. Only 32 percent of them continuously assess these risks and conduct research on target companies before outsourcing.

For example, if you want to use corporate cloud services, consider whether the service provider prevents advanced anycast structure or GSLB structure from countering attacks on the DNS service, UDP, TCP, and ICMP attacks in layers 3 and 4 of the network, and advanced Layer 7 attacks. In some systems, with the increase in requests, system loading may increase so much that the application can’t respond, and some recommendations encounter errors.

In this case, it is possible to respond to the desired workload by increasing the application’s resources or raising similar program examples and balancing the load between these samples. Such cases should be taken into consideration when using super-edgy services.

How do we evaluate the performance of third-party organizations?

Before working with a new company, you first need to evaluate the tools, services, and security mechanisms they use and compare the power of their security solutions to the security approaches used or intended to use in your organization.

1. Familiarity with the desired product and classification of hazards

In the first step, you need to specify the services provided by the company and the sensitivity of the data you intend to share. In addition, you should check the amount of access and control the company has on the data and assess whether these accesses are accepted for your organization. And in general, when outsourcing tasks or receiving services from third-party companies, it is best to pay attention to the following essential points:

Cybersecurity Risks: Evaluate the third-party’s cybersecurity procedures policies and how they deal with security threats and reconsider this cooperation if you see any vulnerabilities.

Risks related to legal standards: These risks are primarily associated with violations of laws, regulations, and standards governing internal and external policies and procedures. For example, under HIPAA law, a breach or leakage of information by a third party may have grave consequences for you (the consumer) because you have not considered the standards and measures required to protect customers’ data.

Credit risks: Information intrusions carried out by third-party companies will significantly damage your organization’s reputation. People’s views of your organization may change and result in customer dissatisfaction and complaints.

Economic risks: Third-party companies often present their duties and obligations in a legal contract with the organization. Therefore, to avoid paying them heavy amounts, it is advisable to carefully read the clauses in financial matters before concluding the contract.

2. Using security assessment models and tools

At this point, through common patterns and tools, you need to prepare different digital questionnaires and assessments and evaluate a third party’s security. For this purpose, it is better to use questionnaires to collect information by standard method and security assessment questionnaire.

3. Raising security-related questions and assessing risks, and requesting documentation

It doesn’t matter if you send the questionnaire to the company or communicate with managers by phone. In any case, you need to fully understand and sum up the company’s security capabilities and their shortcomings. When evaluating the conditions of third-party companies, it is advisable to obtain necessary documents and approvals from them and use them on matters such as industrial certifications such as SOC2, business continuity, and disaster recovery initiatives, information security policies, how to encrypt in-exchange and resident data, the principles and practices of hiring employees, and the performance of third-party partner companies.

If we don’t evaluate the performance of third-party companies, could there be adverse consequences?

Failure to review and evaluate third-party companies’ performance and security solutions can pose many security risks, especially if you provide them with a large amount of user information or transactions, and data leakage may compromise their identity or credibility. Some security risks that were receiving agencies receive services from third-party companies. Among these threats are:

Third-party companies may target phishing attacks, and organizational data may be at serious risk.

If a malware attack targets a third-party company, the contamination will likely spread to partner companies’ systems.

Sometimes third-party companies may lose access to specific systems, negatively affecting your business activities and causing critical and sensitive data loss.

It is also likely that an attacker or malware will steal organizational data.