Remediate Zero Day Events with Third-Party Vulnerability Detection & Response

third party vulnerability response
sabri headshot
Written by Sabrina Pagnotta
Senior Content Marketing Manager

When a major security event like SolarWinds or Log4j happens, how do you assess the impact across your third-party supply chain? Most organizations struggle to effectively react to zero day attacks and other critical vulnerabilities at scale, often following manual and cumbersome workflows. But our latest capability is here to change that.

With the launch of Bitsight Third-Party Vulnerability Response, we are making it easier for organizations to initiate vendor outreach and track responses to critical vulnerabilities through scalable templated questionnaires —with tailored exposure evidence— for more effective remediation.

Vulnerability Response not only facilitates communication with vendors but also allows you to track responses with more precision, coupling automated, bulk outreach with status updates and insights. Let’s take a look at how we do that.

Introducing Bitsight Third-Party Vulnerability Response

As an extension to our existing Third-Party Vulnerability Detection capability, we’re introducing Third-Party Vulnerability Response. Combined, these capabilities provide your team with the most important vulnerability exposure data, and enable you to take action on high priority incidents at a moments notice while surfacing critical information to board and executive level stakeholders to provide assurance.

How does it work?

During major security events, Bitsight will often highlight a critical vulnerability at the top of your Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management application so you can directly navigate to Vulnerability Detection to gather information on that specific vulnerability and your vendor exposure to take action immediately.

On its own, the Vulnerability Detection dashboard shows an overview of how many vulnerabilities affect your entire vendor portfolio, including your critical vendors, plus additional indicators and analysis such as exposure trends, or recently added vulnerabilities. For each of your third-party vendors affected, you will see evidence records that Bitsight has found to highlight exposure.

This data provides unrivaled visibility into vendor exposure, but how can you act on these findings and remediate the risk? 

The new Vulnerability Response capability adds a quick and efficient workflow, closing the loop from critical exposures surfaced —to outreach to vendors impacted. By means of built-in questionnaires, you can prioritize and initiate vendor outreach upon a zero day or major security event more effectively and monitor responses to take additional action where and when needed.

With a complete workflow, when a new zero day vulnerability affects your supply chain, you will be better equipped to limit the network impact and maintain control.

Bitsight Vulnerability Detection & Response will empower you to:

  • Detect, manage, and mitigate emerging zero day events with speed
  • Scale and track vendor outreach efforts with precision
  • Remediate risk more quickly with better prioritization of vendor outreach efforts
  • Build stronger vendor relationships through timely and trusted collaboration
  • Confidently adhere to growing regulatory pressure with easy access to critical vulnerability data

A holistic approach to the vulnerability threat

This release is another innovative application showcasing Bitsight’s continued commitment to helping customers better monitor, manage, and mitigate vulnerabilities across their third-party ecosystems.

The attack surface continues to expand not only through the third-party vendor ecosystem, but also as new assets are added to an organization’s digital footprint. This leads to an increasingly complex attack surface for security teams to defend and creates more opportunities for vulnerabilities to arise. With Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) you can use Vulnerability Detection for first-party needs and see vulnerabilities affecting your company and subsidiaries. This enables you to gain actionable visibility, prioritize remediation efforts, and reduce exposure. 

In addition, SPM capabilities like Attack Surface Analytics enable you to gain continuous visibility into all of your assets – ports, endpoints, databases, applications, cloud instances, even shadow IT and remote offices – so when a vulnerability is discovered, you can act fast and drill down into the root causes of vulnerabilities.

With this holistic view of the organization and its extended supply chain, teams can identify hidden risks and the systems or data that may be compromised if an attacker exploits a vulnerability threat.

The most effective cyber risk management programs adapt to meet the current threat landscape, and so do our cyber risk management solutions. Bitsight’s suite of continuous monitoring technologies and analytics puts objective data in your hands, so you can operate your program with a risk-based approach, real-time intelligence, and efficient workflows.

Explore how Bitsight capabilities can help you grow and build trust across your ecosystem without worrying about expanded risk.