What Happens When Your Vendor’s Vendor Has a Problem?

An organization is in the news.

Headlines say customer data and internal conversation records were accessed – data that teams assumed were safely contained inside support and sales workflows.

Your executives forward the article to your team.

“Do we use them? Are we exposed?”

At first, the answer seems simple.

No contract

No vendor record

No obvious relationship

Then the harder questions start to come

Do any of our vendors rely on them?

Do we need to ask all 700 vendors who have our data if they do business with these folks?

How would we even do that?

Your team scrambles.

The problem isn’t a direct vendor breach.

This is the reality of fourth- and nth-party risk.

These incidents don’t show up clearly in contracts or questionnaires, but when they happen, teams are forced to map exposure, assess impact, and make decisions in real-time – often under pressure.

In this panel, we will talk about where traditional vendor reviews fall short, what it takes to be better prepared when the next incident hits, and how leading teams are moving towards continuous, evidence-first visibility across their extended supply chain.

What you’ll walk away with

• What happens inside security teams when a vendor-of-a-vendor incident breaks?
• Why the current way to do things (questionnaires & scanners) isn’t sustainable?
• How modern approaches can provide real-time, context-based visibility & control over an organization’s entire n-th party risk ecosystem?
• What leading organizations are doing differently to prepare for and address nth-party incidents?