Data is one of an organizations’ most valuable assets, and confidential data must always be protected. Unfortunately, data is also a “slippery” asset – meaning, it ends up in places it shouldn’t be. Criminals pursue it, employees mishandle it, or data “leaks” beyond your enterprise through some other means. To mitigate this risk, organizations turn to data leak detection software as a tool to protect their data.

The cybersecurity threat landscape is rapidly evolving as cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices, and remote work become more widely adopted. As a result, Security Operations Center (SOC) teams are increasingly overwhelmed. In addition to responding to cyber threats, teams must continuously identify emerging vulnerabilities and move quickly to apply and test patches and updates. A failure to do so significantly increases cyber risk. Consider the statistics.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse on March 10, 2023. For several days afterward, you couldn’t watch an hour of news coverage without hearing something about SVB, sending financial markets in the United States into a full-on panic and triggering a heightened sense of fear about a global financial system collapse.

In response to the growing number of cyber incidents, policymakers and regulators around the world are creating new cybersecurity requirements for companies to comply with, including mandates to disclose cyber risks and incidents. For example, new cyber risk disclosure requirements from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are anticipated to be adopted in 2023 and would have a major impact on corporate cybersecurity initiatives.

IT professionals use many tools to streamline cybersecurity tasks, including network security monitoring, penetration testing, network intrusion detection, and encryption. This not only reduces the risk of common security breaches and cyber attacks; it also protects your business’s sensitive and private data from the prying eyes of attackers. That said, not all IT security tools are equal. Some security solutions do a great job of protecting your systems and networks from malicious activities.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has outlined its third-party risk management requirements for United States national banks and federal savings associations in the OCC Bulletin 2013-29. These risk management standards don't only apply to third-party vendor relationships; the OCC expects all banks to follow best third-party risk management practices, whether activities occur internally or through service providers.

Vendor security ratings cannot be adjusted without modifying the criteria for evaluating a vendor’s security posture. Since the ability to make unmitigated adjustments violates the objectivity of security posture measurements, this functionality usually isn’t possible on security rating solutions. However, a workaround is to prevent certain discovered risks from influencing the calculation of a vendor’s security ratings.

Leading cybersecurity experts Major General John F. Wharton, (US Army ret); Oleg Strizhak, Shell’s Digital Supply Chain Risk Manager; and Sam Curry, the CISO of Zscaler, recently sat down with SecurityScorecard’s President of International Operations Matthew McKenna to discuss how organizations can prepare themselves and their supply chains for zero-day attacks as well as best practices for supply chain risk management.

Small and medium-sized businesses account for 4.17 percent of private sector employees and almost half of the United States’ gross domestic product , yet—due to limited finances, resources, and staff—many have difficulties when it comes to supply chain management. Geopolitics, inflation, and worker shortages are just a few variables that can impact supply chains; 86% of SMB supply chains have already been or expect to be impacted by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

When creating a strong risk management program within your organization, your business processes need controls in place for maintaining security and mitigating risks. And to assure the continued effectiveness of these controls, the compliance team should also have continuous control monitoring in place. Continuous control monitoring, or CCM, is a subset of continuous data assurance. It can be programmed within your GRC dashboard or risk management software solution.