Third-Party Vendors and DDoS Attacks: What You Need to Know

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Managing a business requires tenacity to handle various tasks that are primary to meeting your objectives. However, steady growth leads to a sharp increase in the demands of any business.  At some point, it may become impractical to handle all the business demands single-handedly! It’s then that you should consider introducing third-party vendors into your business.

While the vendors will significantly ease your business operations, they also pose a significant risk to your organization. For example, the third-parties may lead to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks if you fail to institute crucial prevention measures.

This article details all that you need to know about DDoS risks associated with third-party vendors. It’ll also highlight various methods that you can use to protect your business from such attacks.

Third-Party Vendors: Do I Need Them?

Using a third-party is a necessity for many businesses. While you may not easily eliminate them from your operation systems, you should always carry due diligence to ensure that only trustworthy dealers access your data.

Also, ensure that you continually learn about various risks that your business faces when dealing with vendors. Being knowledgeable prepares you adequately to prepare mitigation strategies specific to each vendor, thus promoting your business’s security significantly.

What are DDoS Risks?

DDoS is an acronym for Distributed Denial of Service. It entails all attacks that cause traffic overflow in an online platform. The sharp rise in traffic exceeds the web capacity to handle such requests leading to the unavailability of that platform.

Cybercriminals use this technique to keep your staff and clients from accessing various platforms necessary for business operations. In the process, your company will lose customers’ private data and consequently lose the trust and confidence of your clients.

Evolution Of DDoS Risks And Why It Matters For Your Business

Due to technology advancement, cybercriminals have continually developed new techniques to attack and compromise data systems. For example, ransomware attacks have significantly evolved beyond holding your data hostage! These attacks can now be used to paralyze a majority of your business operations, which is detrimental.

DDoS attacks can threaten the normal operations of any organization by blocking their internet connection and denying access to crucial portals of operations. As such, the attacks can hold your organization at a ransom, which makes it a high-urgency security threat. You should institute reliable security measures to avert such occurrences!

To achieve an implementable security plan, it’s recommended that you engage risk management experts to evaluate the degree of risk in your organization and install preventive measures. While hiring an experienced risk management expert may be an expensive escapade for your business, it’ll save you from the frustration that can result from DDoS attacks.

One of the most reliable technique to mitigate DDoS risk is the use of PPDRP approach as detailed below:

• Predict. You should always evaluate the chances of a breach by your third-party vendors. After detecting the gaps that can be exploited cybercriminals, you’re obliged to develop a plan to seal them. The prediction strategy will help you to guestimate the chances of risk occurrence which improves your mitigation strategies
• Prevent. Once you’ve predicted the probability of a risk occurrence, you should work on minimizing or eliminating the chances of its occurrence. You should review all your third parties and conduct due diligence before engaging them. This way, you can be certain that all your vendors have installed security measures, which guarantees a risk-free operation. Also, you can segment your data to ensure that a specific vendor can only access data that they need for operations. Even then, ensure that they sign a contract to bind them to protect your data legally
• Detect. You should learn various techniques for detecting any breach by your third-parties. You’ll achieve this by conducting regular security reviews and educating all your stakeholders on how to detect anomalies in the operations of any vendor
• Respond. One you detect cybersecurity threats, you should have a plan to avert it before it wreaks havoc in your organization. Have parameters that you’d use to evaluate the magnitude of the effects of the occurrence of such a risk. Also, ensure that you easily mitigate the risk without affecting your business operations negatively
• Recover. A quick recovery from a third-party breach will help restore clients’ confidence, thus ensuring a smooth flow of operations. Devise a communication channel that you’ll use to inform your stakeholders about the cyber-attack without causing fears. The primary intention should be to assure the customers that your systems are safe

 

Bottom Line

As your business interconnects with other third-party service providers, the chances of facing cyber-attacks increase significantly. As such, there is a need to educate your employees on how to detect abnormal vendor operations and report in time. This will help you to detect and prevent the occurrence of the risk. Read this article to get more details about how you can safeguard your business from risks associated with third-party vendors.

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