Third Party Intelligence

What is Third Party Intelligence?

Third party intelligence is a threat intelligence service that provides you with alerts and insights into digital threat actors and emerging cyber threats targeting organizations in your supply chain and vendor ecosystem. 

Why is Third Party Intelligence Important?

Third-party intelligence is becoming increasingly important as enterprises undergo digital transformation and supply chains grow in size and complexity. 

Large organizations now have more than 1000 vendors in their supplier ecosystem, and new cybersecurity research shows that more than 80% of organizations have experienced a data breach during the past 12 months because of cybersecurity weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the supply chain. 

In another study, 44% of respondent firms said they had experienced a major data breach that was caused by a vendor.

Third party intelligence gives you the ability to detect emerging cyber threats against third-party organizations in your supply chain and vendor ecosystem, and take the appropriate actions to prevent or mitigate those threats before they negatively impact your business.

How Does Third Party Intelligence Work?

Threat intelligence platforms like ZeroFOX provide enterprises with digital risk protection, threat intelligence, and adversary disruption services to dismantle external threats across the public attack surface. 

When enterprises personalize their ZeroFOX experience by adding information about their brands(e.g. brand names and logos, etc.), people (e.g. executive identities, social media profiles, etc.), data, and assets, our AI-driven platform monitors the public attack surface (e.g. social media, the world wide web, etc.) to identify and detect document leaks, exposed credentials, brandjacking, and impersonation attacks targeting the enterprise or its executive employees.

Enterprises can leverage the same ZeroFOX platform capabilities to monitor and assess the cybersecurity posture of third-party organizations in their vendor networks, searching for evidence of compromised systems, leaked data, exposed credentials, or vulnerabilities. 

ZeroFOX also provides on-demand investigation services, delivering third-party intelligence that focuses on cyber, reputational, and regulatory vulnerabilities and risk.

Five Types of Third Party Intelligence You Need

With cyber threats increasingly emerging from vulnerabilities in the supply chain, enterprises are under increasing pressure to monitor the cybersecurity postures of third party organizations in their vendor networks.

Here are five types of third party intelligence that can help you assess the cybersecurity posture of a third-party organization:

Deep and Dark Web Intelligence

The deep and dark web are hidden areas of the Internet, often used by digital threat actors to stage and launch cyber attacks. The deep web includes all websites that are not indexed by search engines, while the dark web consists of encrypted websites that must be accessed using a specialized browser.

Fraudulent domains used to support phishing and other types of cyber crime are often hosted in the deep web, while the dark web allows anonymous hackers to exchange exploits and techniques for penetrating target organizations. Monitoring the deep and dark web can help you anticipate, detect, and identify cyber attacks directed at third-party organizations in your vendor network.

Brand Intelligence

Brand intelligence involves monitoring the public attack surface for evidence of brandjacking, brand abuse, executive impersonations, and fraudulent use of brand assets (e.g. logos, names, trademarks, etc.). 

Enterprises can gather third-party brand intelligence by monitoring the public attack surface for indicators of emerging threats and brand attacks against their vendor network and supply partners.

Breach Intelligence

Breach intelligence involves monitoring the deep and dark web, paste sites, and breached data repositories to detect evidence of exposed credentials, sensitive document leaks, and compliance/HR violations that involve poor data security.

Enterprises can gather third-party breach intelligence to assess the data security of current or prospective vendor partners.

Fraud Intelligence

Fraud intelligence involves monitoring the entire public attack surface to identify digital fraud specialists and understand the tools, techniques, infrastructure, and social engineering methods they might be using to target third-party organizations in your supply chain. 

Enterprises can gather third-party fraud intelligence to detect and identify fraudulent attacks against third-party companies, or to protect themselves from cyber criminals who impersonate their vendor partners to commit fraud.

Vulnerability Intelligence

Vulnerability intelligence involves tracking the latest vulnerability reports from software vendors and monitoring which vulnerabilities are being analyzed by security researchers and exploited by the adversary community.

Enterprises can leverage third-party intelligence to identify and detect emerging software or networking vulnerabilities and exploits that could be used to target their vendor partners.

Mitigate Third Party Risk with ZeroFOX Threat Intelligence

The ZeroFOX platform combines AI-driven analysis with human expertise, delivering third-party intelligence that helps you manage risk, identify emerging threats, and secure your supply chain against digital adversaries.

Want to learn more?

Check out our Quarterly Threat Landscape Reports to gain a better understanding of the latest trends and digital risk, and discover how your enterprise can defend itself and its vendor network against them with third party intelligence.