Public Legal Record Vetting
Public Legal Record Vetting in the context of cybersecurity is the disciplined, systematic process of searching, aggregating, and analyzing publicly accessible court documents, regulatory filings, government databases, and professional licensing records to identify legal and compliance risks associated with an organization, its executives, employees, or third-party partners. This vetting is a crucial element of a holistic risk management program, as legal history often reveals patterns of behavior, financial instability, or poor controls that directly correlate with a heightened cybersecurity risk.
Scope and Sources of Vetting
The process involves querying various public repositories to uncover information that could serve as a "red flag" for potential security vulnerabilities or insider threats.
1. Litigation and Judiciary Records
These sources provide insight into past or ongoing legal conflicts that may impact an entity's stability or reputation.
Civil and Criminal Court Filings: Searching for records related to fraud, financial misconduct, intellectual property theft, or non-compliance with data protection laws (e.g., class-action lawsuits related to data breaches).
Bankruptcy Filings: Revealing financial distress that could make an executive or a third-party vendor vulnerable to bribery or insider threat.
2. Regulatory and Government Filings
These records reveal failures in governance, compliance, and control environment.
Securities Filings (e.g., SEC): Reviewing disclosures related to corporate governance, risk factors (including cybersecurity risks), and material events like lawsuits or regulatory investigations.
Regulatory Enforcement Actions: Checking databases for fines, consent orders, or penalties issued by regulatory bodies (e.g., the FTC, banking regulators, or international privacy authorities) related to data handling, privacy, or security.
3. Public Records for Entity Verification
These records confirm a party's legitimate status and operational integrity.
Business and Corporate Registry Filings: Verifying a company's legal name, status, and officers, which is essential for validating third-party contracts and detecting shell corporations used for fraud.
Professional Licensing Boards: Checking the status of licenses for key employees or third-party professional services (e.g., legal or accounting firms) to ensure competence and integrity.
Application in Cybersecurity
The findings from Public Legal Record Vetting provide crucial context for cybersecurity risk decisions:
Third-Party Risk Management: Uncovering a history of contract disputes or regulatory noncompliance in a vendor's past can signal weak internal controls and a higher risk of a supply chain security failure.
Insider Threat Detection: Legal records showing undisclosed liens, personal bankruptcies, or high-level litigation for a key employee may indicate financial pressure, raising the risk of data theft or unauthorized system access.
Materiality Determination: Ongoing lawsuits or regulatory investigations related to data security provide the necessary context to assess the materiality of a new cybersecurity incident for public disclosure.
Domain Defense (BEC/Phishing): Records of legal proceedings or corporate actions can be used by attackers as highly credible pretexts in sophisticated Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams (e.g., the BEC Lawsuit Lure Score), making this vetting essential for anticipating targeted phishing campaigns.
ThreatNG significantly aids the Public Legal Record Vetting process by automating the discovery, aggregation, and quantification of external legal and compliance-related risks on the organization's digital attack surface and in public filings. This external intelligence is vital for corroborating legal red flags found in traditional vetting and for providing cybersecurity context.
Augmenting Public Legal Record Vetting with ThreatNG
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery and continuous monitoring, ensuring that all new or forgotten digital assets that might contain legal or compliance-related risks are continuously scrutinized.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring tracks all organization-related domains and web presence. If a legacy subdomain, discovered via Subdomain Intelligence, is found to host an old, publicly accessible internal document mentioning a confidential settlement or ongoing legal dispute, ThreatNG flags this exposure as a material legal record that was unintentionally published.
External Assessment (Security Ratings)
ThreatNG’s security ratings provide a quantified assessment of legal, compliance, and governance risks, effectively automating a portion of the public legal record vetting process.
Brand Damage Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating is a direct input for legal risk, as it is based on findings across Lawsuits, Negative News, and various ESG Violations.
Detailed Example (Litigation Vetting): A low rating (e.g., 'F') signals a high risk due to the presence of a Lawsuit finding. This directly confirms a public legal record related to the organization. Furthermore, the rating incorporates ESG Violations, such as financial or consumer-protection offenses, which are frequently the subject of regulatory enforcement actions and lawsuits, thereby automating vetting for critical legal and compliance issues.
ESG Exposure Rating: This rating provides granular, structured insights into regulatory compliance failures, a key component of legal vetting.
Detailed Example (Regulatory Actions): This rating highlights specific offenses such as Government Contracting, Healthcare, or Employment-related violations. These offenses are often documented in public legal records, and ThreatNG's rating automatically categorizes and flags this compliance failure, acting as a proactive finding for the vetting team.
Investigation Modules
The investigation modules allow security and compliance teams to rapidly access specific, high-value public legal and financial records that are difficult to gather manually.
Sentiment and Financials: This module provides direct access to high-stakes legal and regulatory documentation.
Detailed Example (Vetting of Corporate Filings): The module specifically monitors SEC Filings of Publicly Traded US Companies, including SEC Form 8-Ks, which often contain legally mandated disclosures of material events like lawsuits, regulatory investigations, and changes in corporate governance. This provides immediate access to the most authoritative public legal records relevant to the organization.
Online Sharing Exposure: This module can inadvertently uncover legally sensitive documents that have been leaked or exposed.
Detailed Example (Insider Threat/Data Leak Vetting): The module checks platforms like Pastebin and Scribd. If a legal or financial document is leaked onto these platforms, the module flags it, providing a crucial red flag for vetting that indicates an organizational security or insider risk that would not be found in official court records.
Intelligence Repositories
The DarCache repositories serve as the continuous, high-credibility data streams for legal and regulatory intelligence.
DarCache ESG: This repository is a key source of structured intelligence on regulatory offenses, often linked to public legal records.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: The repository provides continuously updated intelligence on Competition, Consumer, Employment, and Financial offenses, ensuring the public legal vetting process is based on the most current data regarding regulatory failures.
DarCache SEC Form 8-Ks: This repository provides a dedicated, continuous stream of official corporate legal and governance disclosures.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: The constant monitoring of DarCache 8-K ensures that the vetting team receives real-time alerts on any new material legal events disclosed by the organization or its monitored third parties, bypassing manual searches of the SEC database.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG’s legal and compliance intelligence is valuable for cooperatively working with internal platforms that manage compliance and due diligence workflows.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Platforms: ThreatNG’s quantified risk ratings and ESG findings serve as high-confidence inputs for GRC systems.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions: ThreatNG detects a financial offense associated with a vendor, causing the vendor's ESG Exposure Rating to drop. This categorized adverse finding is automatically sent to the GRC platform, which flags it as a breach of the organization's vendor code of conduct policy, thereby automating the compliance check within the legal vetting process.
Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Platforms: ThreatNG provides continuous legal record intelligence for vendors, enhancing static questionnaire-based TPRM.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions: ThreatNG reports a Lawsuit finding against a vendor via the Brand Damage Susceptibility findings. This external legal intelligence is used by the TPRM platform to automatically trigger an enhanced due diligence workflow, requiring the vendor to submit copies of the lawsuit filings and management to sign off on the risk.
