This report nearly coincided with one of the most disruptive cyber attacks in the history of healthcare. The massive payment disruptions for U.S. healthcare providers resulting from the February 2024 BlackCat ransomware attack on Change Healthcare was an extreme yet highly illustrative example of the third-party risks stemming from high interdependence among healthcare organizations. This paper aims to help healthcare organizations and their partners reduce such risks.

This report comes at a time when top organizational risks, such as supply chain, cybersecurity, and third-party risks cut across large parts of all organizations. Stopping supply chain attacks requires understanding their causes and the variables that contribute to them. SecurityScorecard threat researchers assist in that effort by helping organizations gauge their overall risk levels and set priorities for vendor vetting.

SecurityScorecard researchers identified not only a pool of 150 top vendors – based on their detectable market share of products and customers – but also a subset of 15 “heavy hitters” with an even higher market share concentration. In today’s interconnected world, concentrated cyber risk threatens national security and global economies. Much like a precarious house perched on a cliff’s edge, the reliance on a handful of vendors shapes the foundation of our global economy.

In the wake of the Change Healthcare incident, companies are doubling down on efforts to bolster supplier oversight and cybersecurity measures. Every organization must scrutinize its data security practices, assess third- and fourth-party access to sensitive data, and identify critical vendors essential to revenue.

The Fast and the Frivolous uses a massive dataset from SecurityScorecard that spans 1.6 million organizations. We analyze billions of internet-exposed assets to measure the speed of vulnerability remediation over a three-year period. In this report, you’ll find some of the lessons we learned.

This report offers an in-depth examination of the underlying condition that enables such incidents to take place-the widespread interdependence of modern digital supply chains. We analyzed data from over 230,000 organizations to investigate the prevalence of security incidents among third parties. We then measure the extent of vendor relationships and explore the effects of that exposure. Finally, we compare the security posture of organizations to that of their third and fourth-parties to yield data-driven insights on how to identify risky vendors and better manage exposure.

This report goes in-depth into trends in healthcare data security, surveying 26,000 companies and analyzing terabytes of information.

SecurityScorecard ran an analysis, looking at the security ratings of organizations over a six month period and identified which organizations improved those scores the most; whether overall or within a specific risk area.

“In this year’s report, SecurityScorecard looked at more than 1200 healthcare companies from July 2017 through the end of the year and analyzed terabytes of information to assess risk across ten risk factors.”

“To take a look at the cybersecurity health of financial institutions, this September, SecurityScorecard analyzed 2,924 financial institutions in the SecurityScorecard platform to find existing vulnerabilities within banks, investment firms, and other financial firms to determine the cybersecurity performance of the financial sector, especially as compared to other industries. Our team also analyzed the cybersecurity posture of the Top 20 highest performing FDIC-insured banks to understand what security factors pose risks to these financial institutions.”