Organizations increasingly rely on third parties for business operations, and as a result are working with more digital suppliers than ever. According to Gartner, 60% of organizations work with more than 1,000 third parties and this number will grow. High-profile vulnerabilities such as Log4Shell are a constant reminder of the risks posed by a breakdown in the software supply chain. This has spurred enterprises to increase the rigor of software risk assessments to ensure supply chain security.

Is cyber risk insurable? That question is often at the heart of the debate about the future of the cyber insurance industry. One of the primary drivers of that question is the insurance industry’s challenges when managing systemic cyber risk since many believe that systemic cyber risk has the potential to bankrupt the industry. While there hasn’t been a catastrophic cyber incident that has proven the skeptics right, there have been several close calls.

Knowing Your Supply Chain (KYSC) is becoming an increasingly important component of cyber resilience. Understanding the dependencies within your organization and those of your vendors is critical for responding to incidents effectively. Even the most reliable vendors and partners can experience issues. Today, a widespread outage impacted CrowdStrike Falcon, affecting the global supply chain.

AI isn’t what’s going to be the hot topic of the next year; it’s going to be data breaches in the supply chain and the cost that companies face by not reacting quickly to this emerging threat. The cyber attack on Change Healthcare, one of the world’s largest health payment processing companies, illustrates this point. Change Healthcare was a clearing house for 15 billion medical claims annually—accounting for nearly 40% of all claims.

AI isn’t what’s going to be the hot topic of the next year; it’s going to be data breaches in the supply chain and the cost that companies face by not reacting quickly to this emerging threat. The cyber attack on Change Healthcare, one of the world’s largest health payment processing companies, illustrates this point. Change Healthcare was a clearing house for 15 billion medical claims annually—accounting for nearly 40% of all claims.

In late February of this year, Change Healthcare experienced a massive ransomware attack. The company, a subsidiary of United Healthcare, is the largest clearinghouse for insurance billing and payments in the U.S, processing 15 billion medical claims each year.

The growing sophistication of threat actors, supply chain disruptions, and the potential for systemic and catastrophic losses make for a precarious landscape for insurers and those seeking insurance. To help customers reduce risk at scale, insurers and brokers must adopt technology in order to visualize vulnerabilities while also forecasting, quantifying, and monitoring risks.

The interconnected nature of our digital economy requires a shift in how companies think about their cyber risk. Companies need to consider the broader system and how to build mutual support with their entire cyber ecosystem– customers, partners, and vendors. Yet, today, most companies still rely on manual vendor onboarding, monitoring, and point-in-time external security reports to manage supply chain cyber risk – even top Fortune 500 companies.

This week, the SEC issued a statement addressing some of the rampant confusion and inconsistencies observed under the agency’s new cyber breach disclosure rule. The statement itself addresses a technical securities law requirement, that public companies should only use Item 1.05 of Form 8-K to disclose “material” cyber breach information (instead of making voluntary or immaterial disclosures).

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned that cyberattacks against water utilities across the country are becoming more frequent and more severe. The agency urged water systems to take immediate actions to protect the nation’s drinking water. According to the EPA, there are more than 150,000 public water systems across the U.S. serving over 300 million people—virtually all of which are administered and secured at local levels of government.