Third Party Audit
In cybersecurity, a third-party audit is a systematic and independent examination of an organization's vendors, suppliers, or other external entities with access to its data, systems, or processes. The primary goal of such an audit is to assess these third parties' cybersecurity posture, controls, and compliance to identify and mitigate potential risks they might introduce to the leading organization.
These audits are critical because an organization is only as secure as its weakest link, and often, that weakest link is a third-party vendor handling sensitive data or providing essential services. A successful cyberattack on a third party can easily lead to a breach in the primary organization due to interconnected systems or shared data.
A typical third-party audit involves:
Scope Definition: Identifying which third parties to audit (often prioritized by their level of access, criticality of services, and data sensitivity) and what specific areas of their security to review (e.g., data handling, network security, incident response, physical security).
Information Gathering: This can include:
Questionnaires (Vendor Security Questionnaires - VSQs): Standardized sets of questions (like SIG Lite/Full, CAIQ) sent to vendors to self-assess their controls.
Documentation Review: Examining policies, procedures, certifications (e.g., ISO 27001, SOC 2 reports), penetration test reports, and audit logs provided by the vendor.
On-site Visits (less common for all vendors): An auditor might physically visit their facilities to observe controls in practice for highly critical vendors.
Technical Assessments (less common for all vendors): Running vulnerability scans or limited penetration tests against the vendor's external-facing systems (often with mutual agreement).
Security Ratings: Obtaining security scores from external rating agencies that provide a non-invasive, objective view of a vendor's public security posture.
Risk Assessment: Analyzing the gathered information to identify gaps, weaknesses, and non-compliance, and assessing the potential impact (financial, reputational, operational) if these risks were exploited.
Reporting: Documenting findings, identifying vulnerabilities, assessing risk levels, and providing actionable recommendations for remediation.
Remediation and Monitoring: Working with the third party to address identified issues and establishing ongoing monitoring to ensure continued compliance and security effectiveness.
The challenges in conducting third-party audits include the sheer volume of vendors, the varying levels of transparency from suppliers, the difficulty in assessing their proper security posture from a distance, and the dynamic nature of their environments and sub-vendors (fourth parties, fifth parties, etc.).
ThreatNG significantly enhances third-party audits by providing a continuous, external, and attacker-centric view of a vendor's cybersecurity posture. It addresses the challenges of volume, transparency, and dynamism inherent in traditional audit processes. It moves beyond self-attestation to offer verifiable, objective data about third-party risks.
1. External Discovery: ThreatNG performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery without needing connectors. This is crucial for third-party audits as it allows organizations to map a vendor's true external attack surface, often revealing assets or shadow IT that the vendor might not fully document or even be aware of.
Example: ThreatNG can discover internet-facing applications, subdomains, and cloud instances belonging to a third-party vendor that were never formally disclosed in their security questionnaire. This provides an objective view of their perimeter, aligning with the audit's scope definition and information gathering phases.
2. External Assessment: ThreatNG provides a wide range of external assessment ratings that quantify the cyber risk introduced by third parties, offering verifiable data for the audit process:
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure: This assessment is explicitly derived from Domain Intelligence (Enumeration of Vendor Technologies from DNS and Subdomains), Technology Stack, and Cloud and SaaS Exposure.
Example: ThreatNG can identify if a key third-party vendor uses an outdated or vulnerable version of a specific web server (via Technology Stack analysis from exposed server headers in Subdomain Intelligence). This provides an external view of a technology vulnerability within the supply chain, complementing the vendor's self-reported patch management policies.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This score considers parameters like certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, sensitive ports, Code Secret Exposure, and compromised credentials on the dark web.
Example: ThreatNG could detect an exposed sensitive port (e.g., an open RDP port) on a third-party vendor's server or find hardcoded API keys for a critical SaaS integration in a public code repository. These findings provide concrete evidence of potential initial access vectors, directly informing the audit's risk assessment.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: Derived from external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including domain intelligence (exposed sensitive ports, exposed private IPs, and known vulnerabilities), dark web presence (compromised credentials and ransomware events and gang activity), and sentiment and financials (SEC Form 8-Ks).
Example: ThreatNG can show if a supplier has a high susceptibility score due to exposed sensitive ports and recent ransomware activity mentions on the dark web, flagging them as a high-risk entity for the audit's evaluation phase.
3. Reporting: ThreatNG provides various reports that are crucial for documenting findings and facilitating communication during a third-party audit:
Prioritized Report: Can highlight high-risk third parties or specific vulnerabilities within a vendor's external attack surface as critical priorities, aiding the risk assessment and remediation planning phases.
Security Ratings Report: Offers an objective, overall security score for the audited third party.
Example: Auditors can present a vendor's Security Rating from ThreatNG alongside their findings, providing a standardized, objective measure of their external security posture to the primary organization's stakeholders.
Inventory Report: This report lists all discovered external assets and associated technologies of identified third parties, helping to fulfill the audit's information gathering and risk assessment phases.
4. Continuous Monitoring: ThreatNG offers continuous monitoring of all organizations' external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This transforms third-party audits from a periodic snapshot to ongoing vigilance, addressing the dynamic nature of vendor environments.
Example: After an initial audit, ThreatNG can continuously monitor a critical vendor for new vulnerabilities, exposed assets, or changes in their external posture. If a new critical vulnerability appears in their external footprint, ThreatNG can alert the organization in real-time, allowing for proactive engagement with the vendor beyond the annual audit cycle.
5. Investigation Modules: ThreatNG's investigation modules provide granular detail for deeply analyzing specific aspects of a third-party's external security posture, enhancing the audit's technical assessment:
Domain Intelligence: Offers comprehensive data on domains, subdomains, DNS records, and email intelligence.
Example: During an audit, an analyst can use Subdomain Intelligence to examine a vendor's exposed subdomains for misconfigurations or outdated technologies, identifying potential entry points for attackers.
Sensitive Code Exposure: Discovers public code repositories and uncovers digital risks like exposed access credentials, security credentials, and other secrets.
Example: This module can find inadvertently committed API keys or private keys in a third-party vendor's public code, which are critical findings for any third-party audit. They demonstrate a direct path for attackers to gain unauthorized access to shared systems.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: Identifies sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services and SaaS implementations associated with an organization and its vendors.
Example: ThreatNG can identify if a key SaaS provider used by the third party has an open, exposed AWS S3 bucket, potentially leaking sensitive data relevant to the primary organization, even if the third party didn't disclose it.
Technology Stack: Identifies all technologies used by the organization under investigation.
Example: By identifying specific software components (e.g., web servers, CRM systems) used by a vendor, an auditor can cross-reference this with vulnerability intelligence to assess risks.
6. Intelligence Repositories (DarCache): ThreatNG's DarCache repositories provide continuously updated OSINT and threat intelligence, enriching the context of a third-party audit:
DarCache Dark Web: Continuously updated intelligence from the dark web.
Example: ThreatNG can detect mentions of a specific supplier or its employees in dark web forums related to data breaches or credential sales. It provides early intelligence on a potential supply chain compromise directly impacting the primary organization's risk profile.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): Alerts on compromised credentials.
Example: ThreatNG can identify a large dump of compromised login credentials tied to a third-party vendor's domain, signaling a direct risk to the primary organization's supply chain, supporting the audit's risk assessment phase.
DarCache Vulnerability (NVD, EPSS, KEV, PoC Exploits): A holistic and proactive approach to managing external risks and vulnerabilities is provided by understanding their real-world exploitability, likelihood, and impact.
Example: If a critical vendor is running a system with a Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) that has a high EPSS score (likelihood of exploitation), ThreatNG can highlight this. This actionable intelligence allows the primary organization to prioritize engagement with that supplier for remediation or consider alternative solutions.
Complementary Solutions:
ThreatNG's external insights create powerful synergies with other security and third-party risk management solutions, enhancing the overall audit process:
Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Platforms: ThreatNG's Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure assessment and granular investigation modules provide objective, external, and real-time data to enrich traditional TPRM questionnaires and assessments. It moves beyond self-attestation, providing verifiable external security postures for vendors. ThreatNG can show a TPRM platform a vendor's actual exposed ports and sensitive code, complementing their questionnaire responses.
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: ThreatNG's real-time alerts on newly detected supply chain risks (e.g., a vendor's compromised credentials appearing on the dark web, or a misconfigured cloud asset) can trigger automated playbooks within a SOAR platform. This could involve automatically opening a ticket for the vendor management team, initiating a follow-up internal validation, or sending an automated alert to the supplier to address the vulnerability identified during the audit.
Vendor Security Assessment Services/Consultants: Consultants performing third-party audits can use ThreatNG as a powerful reconnaissance tool. ThreatNG provides them with an initial, objective, and continuously updated external view of a vendor's security posture, which can then guide their questionnaire reviews, documentation analysis, and deeper technical assessments, making the entire audit process more efficient and effective.
