Third Party Threat Hunters

Gregory Rasner, Third Party Threat Hunting
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Technology

Third Party Threat Hunters is the podcast for people who manage third-party risk: TPRM, vendor risk, cybersecurity, supply chain and AI risk, and the fourth parties hiding behind your vendors. Hosts Greg Rasner and Paul Kurtz talk with CISOs, risk leaders and researchers about what actually reduces vendor risk, not just what passes an audit. For TPRM, security and compliance teams at banks, credit unions, healthcare and beyond. New episodes weekly, plus short clips. Listen, and get the Fourth Party newsletter: https://www.thirdpartythreathunting.com/podcast

  1. 3d ago

    Beyond Cyber Vendor Risk with Jenna Wells

    A vendor can look “approved” on paper and still be sliding toward a disruption you never saw coming. We talk with Jenna Wells, CEO of Supply Wisdom, about the single risk domain blind spot and why cyber-only vendor reviews miss the early warning signs that show up first in operations, financial health, leadership churn, regulatory exposure, ESG signals, reputation pressure, and location-based disruption. We get practical about what it takes to move from reactive third-party risk management to continuous monitoring and real-time risk intelligence. Jenna explains why questionnaires become stale instantly, how to use risk appetite and prioritization so you are not monitoring 8,000 vendors the same way, and how to fight alert fatigue with thresholds, scoped ownership, and reporting that points to action instead of noise. We also dig into how transparency across procurement, security, and customer teams builds trust and speeds decisions without sacrificing control. AI raises the stakes because it often arrives as an nth-party dependency inside “AI-enabled” SaaS tools. We break down the governance basics: policies and standards from the top, contract clauses for fourth-party disclosure, continuous visibility into downstream providers, and why AI risk management needs its own yardstick beyond traditional cybersecurity frameworks. If you need board-ready metrics, we cover how to summarize your vendor portfolio, event trends, and critical exposures in a way leaders can fund and understand. Subscribe, share this with a risk leader on your team, and leave a review with the biggest vendor risk blind spot you are seeing right now. Free field guide: The Early Warning Field Guide, from Jenna's conversation. Read it at https://thirdpartythreathunting.com/podcast/jenna-wells/ Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  2. Trailer

    Third Party Threat Hunters: Trailer

    Third Party Threat Hunters, hosted by Gregory Rasner, is a podcast about third-party risk, vendor cyber risk and the supply chain threats hiding behind your questionnaires. Hear from practitioners in banks, credit unions and healthcare. New episodes weekly. Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  3. Oct 15

    Change Healthcare and the Concentration Risk Nobody Chose, with Kayne McGladrey

    In February 2024, a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare froze roughly 40% of US medical claims and left hospitals and physicians unable to get paid for weeks, even though most were never touched by the attackers. vCISO and author Kayne McGladrey explains why Change is still the best case study for concentration risk, why AI dependency is set up to repeat it (this time on purpose), and why "cyber risk" is really business risk with a different trigger. We cover: - Why Change Healthcare wasn't a black swan, and what the architecture guaranteed - Same outage, two labels: ransomware vs. a hurricane - Exclusivity clauses, switching costs, and exit strategy as architecture - Why a backup AI model you've never tested isn't a backup - What resource-constrained teams get wrong about TPRM - This month's one move: three revenue processes, three owners, three conversations Kayne's three free starter documents: - Business Process Catalog: drive.proton.me/urls/EE82Y1609C#yMbrqTgQ2u58 - Business Systems Inventory: drive.proton.me/urls/WX6J4G3J18#433XPCYsHNLt - Component Ledger: drive.proton.me/urls/H7PYXX9CFR#MD0LCZrlEntR Free field guide from this episode: thirdpartythreathunting.com/podcast/kayne-mcgladrey/ Kayne's book, Cyber Risk is a Myth (CRC Press), is available wherever books are sold and at your library. All 60+ workshops and templates from the book are free at kaynemcgladrey.com/myth. Newsletter: kaynemcgladrey.com/newsletter. Kayne also offers vCISO services. Also mentioned: the June 2024 CDK Global outage, when thousands of car dealerships couldn't process sales and financing. Free field guides from every episode, plus the BEACON pack: thirdpartythreathunting.com/podcast Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  4. Oct 13

    Third-Party AI Risk, Explained with Shankar Krishnan

    Your third-party vendors are not “adding AI” as a feature. They’re turning into fast-changing agent stacks with models, connectors, plugins, skills, MCP servers, and subprocessors that can shift underneath you in days or even minutes. That’s the uncomfortable backdrop for our conversation with Shankar Krishnan, co-founder of Prompt Armor and a longtime AI threat researcher, as we unpack what third-party AI risk really looks like when the attack surface won’t sit still. We get concrete about the threat that keeps creeping into everyday workflows: indirect prompt injection. Malicious instructions can hide in normal places like documents, emails, and web pages, then get “executed” by an LLM agent that has access to confidential data and powerful actions. We talk through why the scariest outcome is prompt injection leading to data exfiltration, how shadow AI shows up inside the supply chain when vendors enable AI by default, and why the shared responsibility model increasingly pushes risk decisions onto customer configuration. From there, we zoom out to the program level: why SOC 2 reports and standard security questionnaires still have value but fail to describe AI agent behavior, rapid model changes, or evolving dependencies. We cover practical steps for continuous monitoring, tighter alignment between third-party risk teams and AI governance, and the contract clauses that matter most when vendors can change models, features, and training practices without slowing down. We also dig into nth-party mapping and concentration risk, where a handful of foundation model providers can quietly become critical dependencies across your vendor ecosystem. If you’re responsible for AI vendor security, supply chain security, or third-party risk management, this one will help you reset your mental model and prioritize what to monitor next. Subscribe, share this with your risk or security team, and leave a review, then tell us: what’s the hardest AI vendor change for you to track? Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  5. Oct 6

    Shadow AI Supply Chain Risk with Ken Huang

    Your vendor’s product might be running an LLM you never evaluated and that silent dependency can become the cleanest path into your data. We sit down with Ken Huang, author and AI security researcher, to unpack what “third-party AI supply chain” really means when GenAI features are stitched together from embedded models, vector databases, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, and downstream APIs you do not directly control.  We get practical about the risks security teams are actually facing: indirect prompt injection where poisoned “data” becomes “instructions,” data exfiltration through third-party processing, and the way agentic AI turns a text problem into an action problem. Ken explains why overprivileged agents create a massive blast radius, and why identity for agents is still undefined enough that teams need to think in terms of blended identity with intent. We also dig into reward hacking and how multi-agent behavior can push toward unsafe shortcuts in the name of completing a task.  On governance, we talk about where frameworks help and where they stop. We reference OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, Cloud Security Alliance guidance, and NIST AI RMF, then connect them back to threat modeling that accounts for autonomy, indeterminism, and hallucinations. Finally, we translate all of it into vendor risk management upgrades: layer-by-layer questions about models, data/RAG sources, agent tooling, auth and identity pass-through, deployment, evaluation for drift, and observability plus options like AI endpoint detection and response to reduce blind spots.  If you’re trying to move beyond annual questionnaires toward continuous AI risk monitoring, this conversation gives you a clear map and a few immediate next steps. Subscribe, share this with your third-party risk team, and leave a review with the one AI supply chain question you wish every vendor had to answer. Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  6. Sep 30

    AI That Actually Helps TPRM with Brian Shaw

    “100% automated vendor risk assessments” sounds seductive right up until you are staring at unstructured SOC 2 reports, mismatched ISO certificates, and a queue you cannot clear. Greg sits down with Brian Shaw, a long-time third-party risk and compliance leader, to talk about what AI can realistically do in third-party risk management today, and what it absolutely should not do yet. We start with a blunt warning: do not automate a broken process. If a question does not change a risk decision, answering it faster does not improve your TPRM program. From there, we get practical about the best use case most teams feel immediately, evidence collection and normalization. Brian explains how AI and natural language processing can extract risk signals from SOC reports, contracts, and policies, then compare sources to flag contradictions with citations so a human can make a defensible call. We also dig into the human side: analysts are not getting replaced if they build strength in materiality, investigation, mitigation, and relationship management. Then we zoom out to modern vendor risk architecture: annual assessments as a photograph, risk as a movie. We talk continuous monitoring, material events, and why context must stay connected from intake through renewal. Finally, we tackle fourth-party and concentration risk, including the uncomfortable truth that “vendor diversity” can collapse into one shared cloud or model provider dependency, and how risk graphs can help you see the real blast radius. Subscribe for more practitioner-level conversations, share this with your risk team, and leave a review with the one TPRM workflow you would automate first. Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  7. Sep 29

    Continuous Third-Party Risk Monitoring with Girish Redekar

    Compliance often looks like a snapshot, but vendor risk changes between audits. In this conversation, Greg talks with Girish Redekar about why point-in-time compliance gives a false sense of security, why questionnaires break down at scale, and how to spot a vendor that is drifting before it becomes an incident. We also get into governing AI agents and the privileged access they hold, how to think about nth-party risk without pretending you can map every connection, and which board-level metrics show the return on a third-party risk program. Girish closes with one practical step you can take this week. If you manage third-party risk, vendor risk or security for a bank, credit union or healthcare organization, this one will help you move past audit snapshots. Subscribe, share it with your risk team, and leave a review. Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

  8. Sep 24

    Beyond SOC 2: Real Vendor Risk with Nivathan of SecureOS

    Vendor risk programs fail in a predictable way: we obsess over forms, feel good about a clean SOC 2, and then act surprised when a “trusted” third party becomes the fastest path to sensitive data or operational outage. Greg sits down with Nivedan, co-founder and CEO of SecureOS, to unpack why traditional third-party risk management (TPRM) and EPRM workflows often measure the wrong thing and miss what matters most: the context of how your business uses a vendor. We dig into questionnaire fatigue and the trap of treating checklists as controls. A static security questionnaire can’t tell you whether a control exists today, whether it’s sufficient for your specific integration, or whether your internal use case has quietly drifted since onboarding. We walk through concrete examples like marketing analytics tools that are low risk with anonymized data but high risk when fed PII or tied to business critical operations. The takeaway is a simple shift: stop asking “is the vendor secure” and start asking “are our use cases secure.” Then we get practical about AI in cybersecurity and vendor risk management. Forget the hype about AI agents auto-filling 400 questions. The real value is correlation: pulling context scattered across contracts, documentation, procurement systems, emails, and Slack into one place so a human can make a defensible decision and prioritize the right actions. We also connect third-party risk to zero trust, covering privileged access management, identity-bound sessions, and just-in-time access, plus why continuous assessment matters far more than an annual review. If you want a step you can take this week, we share a lightweight “context graph” exercise for your 10 most critical vendors that clarifies data access, dependencies, and what happens if a vendor fails. Subscribe, share this with a teammate in security or procurement, and leave a review with your biggest vendor risk blind spot. Send us a question for a future episode Support the show

See All (16)

Trailer

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Third Party Threat Hunters is the podcast for people who manage third-party risk: TPRM, vendor risk, cybersecurity, supply chain and AI risk, and the fourth parties hiding behind your vendors. Hosts Greg Rasner and Paul Kurtz talk with CISOs, risk leaders and researchers about what actually reduces vendor risk, not just what passes an audit. For TPRM, security and compliance teams at banks, credit unions, healthcare and beyond. New episodes weekly, plus short clips. Listen, and get the Fourth Party newsletter: https://www.thirdpartythreathunting.com/podcast

Information

  • Creator
    Gregory Rasner, Third Party Threat Hunting
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    16
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Third Party Threat Hunters
  • Show Website
    Third Party Threat Hunters

You Might Also Like