Black Kite Gives Organizations the Power to Solve Nth-Party Cyber Risk With First-of-its-Kind Supply Chain Monitoring Module

By Globe Newswire Published on April 2, 2024, 19:03 IST

BOSTON, April 02, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Black Kite, the leader in third-party cyber risk intelligence, today announced the availability of its Supply Chain & Nth Party Monitoring module. The new solution is the first in the industry to combine Nth-Party and high-profile cyber risk intelligence, including cascading and concentration risk, so organizations can anticipate and mitigate security incidents in their supply chains. In doing so, they can avoid the impacts these incidents have on their businesses, such as breaches at their own organizations, or damaging business disruptions.

Threat actors increasingly target vulnerable suppliers, often fourth, fifth, or even sixth parties, presenting potential cascading repercussions for organizations as repercussions ripple up their supply chains, and underscoring the critical need to uncover elusive risks extending beyond direct relationships. However, gaining visibility throughout the supply chain is extremely difficult. Studies show that only one in three organizations collects risk information on fourth parties and beyond, leaving a massive blind spot in an organization’s risk management.

While other vendors have tried to address this challenge, their offerings are clunky and tables-based, lack navigability and filtering for analysis, and are limited in scope — most stopping at fourth parties. Black Kite’s solution extends to Nth parties, and provides interactive visualizations, custom filtering, and easy-to-understand and standards-based ratings.

Using Black Kite’s Supply Chain Module, customers can now extend their supply chain visibility beyond just third parties, to inform both internal and external decisions. Because of its unique, automated supplier detection functionality, customers won’t spend valuable time seeking information or relying on supplier disclosures, which frees security teams to drive conversations and proactively mitigate potential threats.

“Supply chains have become complex matrices of digital connections, with hidden relationships and concentrations of risk. Untangling this matrix can’t be done manually. The complexity makes it too time-consuming, leaving organizations open to risk,” said Chuck Schauber, chief product officer at Black Kite. “With the Black Kite Supply Chain module’s automated capabilities, customers can see and understand these intricate relationships to control their cyber ecosystem risk. Knowing where vulnerabilities lie within the supply chain in real time empowers them to make the most informed decisions and avoid a cascading and potentially devastating impact.”

Black Kite bolsters Nth-party risk management by enabling teams to:

Discover hidden relationships and concentration risk. Visibility gives customers the data beyond direct vendor relationships, allowing them to drive better business decisions. With Black Kite’s Concentration Risk metric, customers can identify the suppliers a majority of their vendors rely on that could have outsized impacts on their supply chains – resulting in disruptions in business operations.
Automate response to Nth-party incidents. In real time, customers can identify victimized Nth parties and coordinate their responses, knowing how vendors and their suppliers are interconnected. Customers won’t have to wait for vendors to disclose incidents in their supply chains, allowing them to be more proactive and get ahead of business interruptions.
Foster meaningful vendor engagements. The VendorMap feature automatically detects vendors and the interconnected relationships among them, so customers can monitor risks in their and their vendors’ supply chains. Additionally, Black Kite has folded in physical supplier data, so companies can understand how physical goods or service providers are connected to their supply chains. This allows customers to enter vendor negotiations with a comprehensive understanding of their supply chains and the risks they pose.