The statistics are alarming: in 2024, sixty-one percent of companies suffered a breach that began with one of their vendors. It isn’t enough to lock down your systems; every supplier in your chain needs the same level of care. In this blog, we’ll walk through two high-profile supply-chain incidents, explore why once-a-year audits fall short, and share practical steps you can take today to keep your whole ecosystem secure.

The Sisense Meltdown: How One Exposed Key Put 100 Million Records at Risk

In April 2024, business-intelligence provider Sisense accidentally committed AWS access keys into a self-hosted GitLab repository. Attackers found those keys and exfiltrated credentials, SSL certificates, email passwords, and more, exposing over 100 million downstream records.

• Rotate all keys within 24 hours of any suspected compromise.
  
  
• Require peer review on every code change to prevent secrets slipping into repositories.
  
  
• Encrypt all storage buckets so stolen keys yield nothing readable without proper decryption.
  

Treat your vendors like internal teams. If they store secrets or manage critical data, they need the same guardrails you enforce on yourself.

The Okta Support-Portal Breach: Session Tokens Taken Hostage

Late in 2023, hackers stole a support-team service-account password, saved in someone’s personal Google account, and used it to download HTTP Archive (HAR) files from hundreds of support tickets. Those HAR files contained session tokens and cookies that let attackers pose as real users, compromising customer environments.

• Enforce multi-factor authentication on every vendor account, including service and support logins.
  
  
• Block personal cloud-storage logins on corporate devices to keep work credentials out of personal vaults.
  
  
• Automatically scrub session tokens and cookies from any uploaded troubleshooting files.
  

If your vendor helps you fix your systems, make sure their tools cannot become attack vectors.

Why Yearly Audits Leave Dangerous Gaps

Traditional vendor audits are like taking a photograph of a moving train. You see what’s true on audit day, but you miss every change that happens afterward. Patches go uninstalled, new vulnerabilities emerge, and geopolitical events can suddenly thrust a supplier into the crosshairs, all without you knowing.

Continuous threat feeds solve this by delivering near-real-time alerts about your vendors. As soon as an exploit is published or unusual behavior appears in a vendor’s environment, you receive a notification. No more waiting months to discover a critical firewall has been disabled.

Catching Trouble Early with AI-Driven Monitoring

AI tools can read your vendors’ logs every minute, spotting odd API calls, overdue patches, or after-hours admin logins. Prompt Sapper, for example, ingests telemetry from dozens of suppliers and compares it against known attacker techniques cataloged in MITRE’s ATT&CK framework. In many cases, it flags potential issues up to seventy-two hours before they become full-blown breaches.

These platforms do more than just alert you. They assign risk scores to each vendor, highlight trends, such as a spike in unpatched vulnerabilities after a major CVE release, and integrate directly with your incident-response playbooks. It’s like having a vigilant guard that never sleeps, giving your security team precious hours to investigate before an incident escalates.

DORA 2025: New Rules for Financial Firms and Their Suppliers

On 17 January 2025, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will apply to banks, insurers, fintechs, and any third-party service providers they rely on. Key requirements include continuous monitoring of vendor performance, mandatory “right-to-audit” clauses, and subcontractor-notification provisions to ensure you know if your vendor hires someone else.

Major incidents must be reported to regulators within 24 hours using structured templates. If your organization falls under DORA, your vendor contracts need to be updated now. For others, regulators worldwide are watching this play out, and similar rules could be coming to your region soon.

Aligning Vendor Controls with ISO, NIST, and MITRE

The world’s leading frameworks all include supplier-risk sections. To turn compliance into confidence:

1. Map your vendor-assessment questions to ISO 27001 Annex A.15 on supplier relationships and to NIST CSF 2.0 categories for protection and detection.
   
   
2. Adopt NIST SP 800-53’s 2025 privacy and data-minimization controls by requiring cloud suppliers to submit Privacy Impact Assessments.
   
   
3. Crosswalk vendor practices against MITRE ATT&CK’s Supply-Chain Attack framework to ensure they cover key mitigations.
   

Publishing a clear control-mapping matrix shows stakeholders you’re not guessing about your vendors’ security; it’s all right there in black and white.

A Fortune 500 Success Story

One large financial services firm plugged AI monitoring into its top twenty suppliers and saw a dramatic drop in third-party breach losses, eighty percent less in 2024, avoiding nearly half a billion dollars in potential damages. Their secret was simple:

• Daily risk-indicator dashboards covering patch timing, penetration-test results, and code-review rates.
  
  
• Annual multi-party resilience drills with vendors to test communication and recovery playbooks.
  
  
• Automated contract scans that flag missing audit and encryption clauses before renewal dates.
  

They turned vendor management from a checkbox exercise into a living, measurable security capability.

Easy-Win Tactics You Can Start Today

• Segment your suppliers by criticality so high-impact vendors get deep, continuous reviews while low-risk partners maintain basic hygiene.
  
  
• Subscribe to vendor-specific threat feeds that monitor code leaks, dark-web chatter, and proof-of-concept exploits.
  
  
• Automate SLA enforcement: if a vendor misses a patch deadline, trigger an escalation email or even a fee.
  

These steps require minimal setup but deliver immediate, tangible reductions in your exposure.

SEO Snapshot: Keywords to Win Organic Traffic

Top trends in 2025 show growing searches for vendor KRI frameworks, real-time threat feeds for suppliers, and AI-driven vendor risk platforms. Long-tail phrases like “how to secure third-party cyber hygiene” and “continuous vendor assessment best practices” can help capture niche audiences and featured snippets. Weave these into your headings, image alt text, and FAQs to maximize visibility.

Redirect: Take Control of Your Vendor Risk

Vendor security doesn’t have to be your weakest link. Reach out to iRM today through our Contact Us page for expert guidance on AI-driven vendor risk audits and third-party hygiene checks. Let’s build a vendor ecosystem that fortifies your defenses, not weakens them.