What is a Third Party Breach?
Many organizations fail to realize that by interacting with third parties, they could be handing threat actors the keys to the back door. Even though these third parties aren’t under your organization’s control, they usually have access to your networks, applications and resources. If a threat actor compromises one of your suppliers, vendors, contractors, or even business partners, they can gain unauthorized access to the sensitive information stored here, resulting in a data breach. This information could be tampered with, destroyed, stolen, or held at ransom by attackers. Of course, this is devastating for the organization affected, forcing them to endure legal implications, loss of stakeholder trust, and a blow to their finances.
How Do Third Party Data Breaches Happen?
Compromised Credentials
Most common cause of a third party data breach is through the use of compromised credentials to gain access into the third party network, and then move laterally to your organization. These credentials may have been bought on the cyber underground from a previous data breach, or pried from a third party employee in a phishing attack.
Social Engineering Attacks
Phishing attacks are an example of such an attack. By impersonating a legitimate source or using an emotional appeal, a threat actor can contact and trick an unwitting member of staff into revealing their log in details or download malware simply by asking. The threat may already be waiting in your inbox!
Unsecured Assets
Delaying the latest patch update will provide threat actors with vulnerabilities to leverage for entry to your network. Also, the cloud services used by many operations often operate a shared responsibility model for cyber security, leading to customer generated misconfigurations in the infrastructure which may permit unauthorized users access to confidential data stored there.
Malware
An employee in a third party can inadvertently download malware, such as keyloggers, onto their operating system which sends sensitive data, such as logins for the organizations they serve, back to a command and control server.
What Can You Do to Stop a Third Party Breach?
Before onboarding or purchasing your third party service, it is critical to perform a comprehensive risk assessment that covers their cyber security systems and incident response. This way you can understand the risk they pose to your organization before they become the weak link in your supply chain.
Don’t give third party vendors more access than they need to complete the job. Organizations following this rule will reduce their attack surface.
CTI can ensure you aren’t always on the back foot when it comes to protecting your organization from data breaches. By providing you intelligence on active and emerging threats that might affect your third parties, and therefore your own organization, you can take steps to prevent these attacks or mitigate their effects.
How Can Intel 471 help?
The longer you take to identify and contain a data breach, the
greater the impact to your company. This is why Intel 471 monitors
the cyber underground continuously and alerts you of signs you have
been breached so that you can take action to mitigate, fast. We also
alert to relevant threats including the sale of compromised
credentials which may elicit a breach or the targeting of specific
vulnerabilities by threat actors to prevent future attacks.
Check if you’ve left the door open for threat actors by mapping
your ever growing attack surface. Intel 471’s Attack Surface
Protection will map your assets so you can identify unpatched shadow
IT providing an entry point for attackers. We can also monitor your
attack surface continually and alert you to any changes that you need
to be aware of.
Our ‘boots on the ground’ analysts are native speakers of the
languages and the underground ecosystems inhabited by threat actors.
This gives us a unique insight into how they operate. By providing
you up-to-the-minute intelligence about the tactics, techniques, and
procedures (TTPs) of attackers, you can structure a dynamic cyber
security defense, rather than a reactive response.
We provide technical intelligence, such as IOCs, derived from
tracking malware and malicious infrastructures which can help you
identify intrusion attempts and malware infections more efficiently
and effectively to mitigate the damage of a future data breach.
We are your window into the cyber underground. Our unparalleled CTI offers unique insights into attackers’ intent and motivation to change the odds of an attack. Our intelligence can help you detect and prevent and detect breaches as quickly as possible to eliminate or minimize impact. Our capabilities include:
