The Next Frontier of Vendor Risk Scoring: What Needs to Change?

The Next Frontier of Vendor Risk Scoring: What Needs to Change?

Vendor risk scoring is one of the largest issues security teams face. A company today depends on more third-party tools, platforms, and services than ever before, but most scoring models are missing warning signals that count.

To really bring up-to-date vendor risk scoring, security leaders need to take a close look at how vendors treat their data security. Especially, how vendors keep customer conversations and private information safe across all the different channels of communication.

Communication Channels Have Become a Huge Blind Spot

Customers communicate with companies via email, chat, social media, a support portal, and even video calls. Every channel carries risks, and a vendor on your behalf has to address them.

This is where you might run into a serious problem. A vendor may look great on paper and still use outdated, insecure tools to communicate with your customers.

For example:

  • An email support team using unencrypted emails.
  • A chat system that doesn’t protect conversations end-to-end.
  • A social media vendor with weak internal controls.
  • A video call tool that stores recordings insecurely.

Make secure communication a central part of your vendor scoring plan, and you will eliminate many potential risks in the future.

Encryption Should Be the Bare Minimum

Most customers don’t think about encryption, but they definitely believe that companies are applying it. Your customers will expect that every communication that happens between them and your business is secure.

But the reality is different. Vendor scoring in the future should check to see if a vendor actually uses current encryption on all of their channels, not just if they say they do.

Identity Checks Are More Important Than Ever

Social engineering is a simple method that attackers use to breach accounts. Workday, a cloud-based software company, recently fell victim to a social engineering attack. Most attackers even impersonate actual customers, hoping a support team will provide personal information or reset their passwords.

Vendors must prove they take identity verification seriously. That means having a clear identity verification procedure, consistent ways of handling sensitive requests, and tools that alert you to suspicious behavior.

Limited Access Control

Another area that business owners tend to overlook is access control. A lot of breaches happen not because of sophisticated attacks but because most of the employees within the company have access to customer information.

Responsible vendors must put only a few people in charge of that information. They also need to track access and take away permissions easily when a person changes roles or leaves for a new job.

Your risk scoring should show how tightly a vendor controls access to customer conversations, transcripts, or private data if they handle these things.

Monitoring Tools Are a Necessity

Problems with security don’t usually start with a big breach. Usually, someone quietly leaks a password, exposes a configuration, or compromises an employee account without anyone noticing. And when you’ll notice, it might be too late.

Here is where credit monitoring can help. Some credit monitoring tools can help to evaluate your vendor, while others are focused on your personal security. A latter tool will notify you in case of any suspicious activity, which can indicate a fraud attempt. It can be an early sign of a data breach from the side of a current vendor. Use this warning to prevent further damage and investigate the source of a breach.

Vendor Risk Scoring Must Become Continuous

Old-style vendor assessments happen once a year or once a quarter. With threats closing in now more than ever, thanks to AI, that’s not enough. But a vendor’s level of protection can change in an instant.

All they need is:

  • Real-time signals.
  • Ongoing monitoring.
  • Alerts about changes in communication security.
  • Insights from credit monitoring.
  • Early warnings from dark web intelligence.

At the end of the day, the future of vendor risk scoring is really about understanding vendors the same way you understand your own team. You get a glimpse of how they operate, how they communicate, and whether they make your security stronger or weaker.