UpGuard is excited to announce the latest addition to our Vendor Risk Questionnaire Library: the DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) questionnaire! The addition of DORA to the Questionnaire Library reflects UpGuard’s ongoing commitment to providing our customers with the necessary tools to navigate today’s evolving regulatory standards.

In an era where data breaches and privacy concerns dominate headlines, regulatory frameworks like India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP) have become indispensable. The DPDP Act safeguards the privacy of individuals by regulating how organizations operating in India can collect, process, and store personal data. Landmark regulations like the DPDP Act are essential for enhancing data security.

Each year, we revisit our risk rating system to ensure it best reflects the needs of security practitioners safeguarding their organizations and supply chains. For our 2024 update, we’ve made two closely related changes: we’ve recategorized some of our existing findings to make an organization’s risk profile more understandable and recalibrated our scoring algorithm to more clearly illustrate the impact of specific risks.

The rapid expansion of the digital landscape adds increasing complexity to cybersecurity, especially for enterprises that could have up to 100,000 vendors in their supply chain. Addressing these challenges requires implementing an Attack Surface Management (ASM) strategy tailored to enterprise businesses' unique risk profiles. This post outlines the importance of ASM for enterprises and offers a strategy for ensuring its effective implementation.

‍The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has introduced Prudential Standard CPS 230 to enhance the operational resilience of financial institutions and protect the broader financial system from disruptions. APRA CPS 230 details the crucial requirements for managing operational risks, ensuring business continuity, and overseeing third-party service providers.

External attack surface management (EASM) is the continuous exercise of managing cybersecurity risks associated with an organization’s external-facing digital assets. The process includes monitoring, identifying, reducing, and mitigating risks present across an organization’s external attack surface.

In late July 2024, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-4789 and CVE-2024-5217) affecting ServiceNow to its list of known exploited vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities can allow unauthenticated users to execute code remotely, posing severe risks to organizations that use the platform. The potential for unauthorized access and severe data breaches makes addressing these vulnerabilities crucial.

Vendor risk monitoring is the process of continuously identifying, assessing, and managing security risks associated with third-party vendors. This effort is crucial to a successful Vendor Risk Management program as it ensures an organization’s third-party risk exposures remain within acceptable levels throughout each vendor's lifecycle.

The effectiveness of your entire Vendor Risk Management program is contingent on your vendor risk monitoring capabilities. Insufficient vendor security monitoring that fails to detect cyber risks during onboarding or any new cybersecurity risks throughout the vendor lifecycle will inevitably emerge later on as a major breach risk. To help you choose a vendor risk monitoring solution that will maximize your VRM investment, this post ranks the top eight vendor monitoring platforms on the market in 2024.