Navigating the Unknown: Zero-Days in the Supply Chain

Navigating the Unknown

Last week, SecurityScorecard’s Senior Director of Sales Enablement David Szabo, moderated a webinar on zero days in the supply chain with fellow executives, including: Steve Cobb, CISO; Alexander Heid, VP, Fellow, Threat Research; Simon Jones, Director of Advisory Services; and more. They shared their insights and advice on how zero-day attacks are developed, how they are leveraged against an organization and its supply chain, how security teams can gain visibility, and how organizations can prevent their vendors from being breached by zero-days.

Company supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, presenting significant challenges and risks to all organizations. Companies need to be able to track and monitor threats and risks that impact any vendor that holds their data or has access to their systems — one of the largest data breaches in the last few years resulted from the breach of a HVAC vendor.

The panel agreed that there are many moving parts when it comes to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. And with the rapid proliferation and weaponization of these vulnerabilities, even critical infrastructure is at risk of exploitation. Case in point: several years ago, SecurityScorecard’s own threat intelligence team leveraged our Attack Surface Intelligence to find a vulnerability in a hydroelectric dam in Italy that could be opened if it got into the wrong hands. 

Steve Cobb pointed out that organizations with a good handle on zero-days have good proactive and reactive incident response plans in place. Organizations also need to have greater visibility into their attack surface as a whole; this means having an inventory of the software and hardware they utilize, so they’re not in the dark when vulnerabilities are discovered. 

But this is usually easier said than done. Organizations often lack the capacity, resources, and expertise to properly identify and mitigate cyber risks that can lead to increased threat exposure and unhealthy vendor relationships

Managed Cyber Risk Services 

That’s where SecurityScorecard’s Managed Cyber Risk Services comes in. Managed Cyber Risk Services helps to bridge the gap between vendor risk and cybersecurity by helping organizations augment their existing third-party risk cyber programs with a team of cybersecurity and third-party risk management professionals. With experience in incident response, digital forensics, and vendor management, SecurityScorecard helps organizations to uncover vulnerabilities and improve cyber hygiene across their vendor landscape.

Using powerful risk signals and threat insights from the SecurityScorecard platform, Managed Cyber Risk Service experts go beyond vendor onboarding and questionnaire management by proactively analyzing and mitigating risk associated with your vendor landscape. With third-party cyber defenders by your side, you strengthen your third-party risk management (TPRM) cybersecurity defenses while reducing unnecessary interruptions in your day so you can reallocate resources to other key business initiatives.

Zero-Day-as-a-Service Can Help 

As part of Managed Cyber Risk Services, SecurityScorecard is now offering Zero-Day-as-a-Service (ZDaaS), an early warning and detection service that alerts organizations to new and emerging potential zero-day vulnerabilities across their third-party vendor landscape. Due to a lack of preparedness, resources, and knowledge, security teams may lack the tools to monitor zero-day vulnerabilities across their supply chain. ZDaaS offers timely analysis and reporting of high-risk threats. With ZDaaS, security and vendor risk management teams can effectively identify and control these threats, wherever they reside, bolstering their vendors’ cybersecurity posture and safeguarding their own business operations. 

How Does ZDaaS Work? 

This service uses SecurityScorecard’s rich catalog of data signals for initial indications of zero-day vulnerabilities and extensive threat intelligence expertise, and also includes monitoring notifications and alerts from vulnerability datasets, such as NIST’s National Vulnerability Database and CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerability Catalog. 

This is all done by the SecurityScorecard Risk Operations Center (ROC) team to address this critical and often overlooked gap in vendor risk management. The ROC team is a talented and dogged group of cybersecurity professionals with 100+ years of collective experience in cybersecurity investigations, specializing in digital forensics, incident response, threat hunting, and third-party cyber risk management. 

What’s Included in ZDaaS?

ROC is continuously monitoring our vast signals for initial indications of a zero day vulnerability. This includes:

• Leveraging SecurityScorecard signals and threat intelligence to identify active zero-day exploits as they are identified.
• Assessing vendors within your third-party ecosystem for potential impact to announced zero-day vulnerabilities.
• Providing comprehensive reports with precise recommendations to counter identified zero-day vulnerabilities to help solidify your cybersecurity defenses.

Get Proactive About Zero-Days in Your Supply Chain with SecurityScorecard 

As the only company to offer Zero-Day-as-a-Service, SecurityScorecard can help organizations of all sizes and in all industries save time and resources, while also shielding them from data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage. By offering greater visibility into an organization’s ecosystem, together we can reduce cyber incidents, minimize supply chain risk, and increase our collective cyber resilience. 

Learn more about Managed Cyber Risk Services, Zero-Day-as-a-Service (ZDaaS), and request your personal supply chain exposure report for a recent zero-day vulnerability to see how the service works.