Happy October! This month marks the 18th annual Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM). Put on by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCSA), the goal is to help raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity to organizations.   

This year’s NCSAM theme — “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart.” — serves as a good reminder to both individuals and organizations to own their role in protecting part of cyberspace.  

To celebrate NCSAM and do our part in helping strengthen organizations’ cybersecurity posture, we’ve compiled the following list of top RiskRecon resources for security and risk practitioners to manage cyber risk, maximize ROI, and drive business value. 

Guide to Continuous Monitoring for Third-Party Risk — Traditional risk assessments are typically conducted according to a previously set schedule and only give a point-in-time snapshot of an organization’s risk posture. Static questionnaire-based assessments that assess vendors at a fixed frequency don’t give an accurate view of risk exposure, nor do they offer an effective route for requesting remediation from third-party vendors.  

According to research from RiskRecon and Cyentia Institute, 81% of enterprises report that at least 75% of their vendors claim perfect compliance to their security requirements, yet only 14% are highly confident that vendors actually perform those requirements.  

Traditional questionnaire-based assessments just aren’t built to address today’s dynamic business landscape. Robust continuous monitoring solution is proven to yield highly accurate and prioritized findings. RiskRecon’s accuracy attribution has been independently certified to 99.1% accuracy.  

Our guide to incorporating continuous monitoring into your third-party risk management program offers step-by-step instructions for security risk practitioners to incorporate continuous monitoring to enhance their organization’s third-party risk management program. 

AWS Core Assessment Playbook & Questionnaire — We believe that third-party cybersecurity assessments founded on objective evidence are the most effective way to achieve good risk outcomes. Our complimentary Amazon Web Services (AWS) Toolkit features a Core Assessment Playbook and Questionnaire, containing a step-by-step methodology for assessing the quality of third-party security configurations of any AWS deployment and critical information on the 33 essential AWS security assessment criteria.  

Supply Chain Visualizer — As our digital ecosystem expands exponentially and grows increasingly connected, the challenge of managing an organization’s risk surface multiplies.RiskRecon’s risk priority matrix enables security and risk practitioners to concentrate and prioritize efforts on their most critical vendor issues. A recent study of RiskRecon by Forrester found that targeting assessments cut level of effort for assessments by 56%. In addition, the assessment efficiency is worth more than $591,000 to the composite organization. 

To address the uptick in supply chain attacks, we recently enhanced RiskRecon’s cyber risk platform with a newsupply chainvisibility feature. With the new feature, security and risk practitioners canidentify potential access pointsfor attackers intheirorganization’s supply chain, mitigate vulnerabilities, and communicate cyber-attack control and mitigation plans with key company stakeholders. 

Thesupply chain visualizer builds on RiskRecon’s best-in-class cybersecurity risk ratings solution to automatically pinpoint and prioritize extended supply chain risk, enabling security teams to streamline their organization’s supply chain environment, including fourth-party software dimensions, hosting providers, and other relationships, as well as address critical issues faster.  

As a leading provider of cybersecurity ratingsand insights to customers across industries – ranging from finance and insurance to aerospace and healthcare – our mission remains fixed – providing the world’s easiest method for third-party risk management professionals to understand and act on their cyber risk. Sign up for a demo of RiskRecon to see for yourself why we’re the only solution for managing third-party cyber risk at scale. 

For more information and quantifiable business benefits of RiskRecon, download Forrester’s “The Total Economic ImpactTM Of Mastercard RiskRecon.” 

Get involved with NCSAM by joining the online conversation using the hashtag, #BeCyberSmarton social media, and follow@RiskRecon,@CISAgov, and@StaySafeOnlineto get cybersecurity tips and news.