Are your third-party vendors leaving the door open to hackers?

by Armond Caglar - Senior Threat Specialist, TSC Advantage - Friday, 20 June 2014.
 
By now, every security professional in the world should know the story about Fazio Mechanical Services. The Pennsylvania-based company specializes in heating, air conditioning and refrigeration services, and numerous large companies, including Target, trusted Fazio for its HVAC expertise. Fazio’s level of security expertise, however, was another matter. Its reliance on a free version of a malware detection tool, plus its access to Target’s external billing system and online project management portals, plus a savvy attacker added up in 2013 to the fourth largest data breach of all time.

In every arena, smart enemies choose the path of least resistance. In the data security realm, that path increasingly goes through third-party vendors and subcontractors. Sophisticated, determined hackers have done their homework on the best and easiest ways to attack organizations and exfiltrate data, cause business disruption, or in the case of SCADA attacks, spark catastrophic incidents, such as failure of supply events.
 
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