SolarWinds attack and Executive Order on America's Supply Chain illuminate gaps in supply chain risk management, spur innovative solutions by Fortress Information Security

Challenges include identifying product provenance, detecting trojanized patches, and compliance competing with security for resources

News provided by

Fortress Information Security

Mar 09, 2021, 11:56 ET

ORLANDO, Fla., March 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortress Information Security (Fortress) today announces a series of innovations to their risk and compliance management solutions in response to emerging security challenges such as those illustrated by the recent SolarWinds attack, and in alignment with Executive Order 14017 on America's Supply Chain.

Asset to Vendor Network Marketplace
The Asset to Vendor Network (A2V) is a collaborative platform for sharing cybersecurity information to reduce the cost of supply chain risk management efforts by eliminating redundancies. This allows companies and their vendors to focus more resources on security while easing the burden of compliance.

A2V will soon include a marketplace where real-time risk intelligence can be accessed, such as validated vendor and product assessments, hardware and software bills of materials, as well as alerts for breaches, M&A activity, and compliance violations.

Automated Findings Lifecycle Management
Product and vendor risk assessments often find gaps in cybersecurity hygiene that need to be resolved before the vendor can enter or renew a contract. The remediation process to resolve these findings can be lengthy.

Fortress Platform's secure vendor portal now automates findings resolution management by providing vendors with findings notifications and reminders based on their planned remediation and evidence collection activities. Alerts from changes in ratings are escalated to findings automatically by preconfigured rules. Ratings are then easily compared between vendors in a new Vendor Scorecard module which can be published to unlimited client users.

Compliance Automation
Fortress solutions already align with regulatory frameworks such as NIST, ISO, and NERC CIP. Fortress now offers a comprehensive system to track compliance for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). CMMC is an emerging regulatory framework to standardize and streamline regulatory compliance across all industries for government contractors.

Fortress' CMMC module will offer a comprehensive system to track CMMC compliance, including identifying variance between stated and documented compliance levels. The assessments can be across audit periods and multiple scopes, such as enterprise-wide or by data enclave, support multiple internal or external stakeholders for evidence collection and sign-off, provides alerts for evidence refresh, and produce CMMC Evidence Packets to demonstrate compliance to auditors.

Fortress will also offer solutions for compliance with Section 889 (a)(1)(B) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (NDAA 889). NDAA 889 states that government contractors must represent that they do not use banned telecommunications and video surveillance equipment–not only in fulfillment of their contract, but in any case, whatsoever–or risk severe fines and penalties.

A new feature in the Fortress Platform enables automated scanning of large vendor populations to identify possible compliance violation risks, providing government contractors with an efficient solution to identify both the devices and third-party manufacturers prohibited by NDAA 889.

Enhancing Vendor Risk Assessment Features
Assessing the security risk of large vendor populations within compliance deadlines can be daunting. Data Driven Risk Ranking offers the ability to prioritize vendor populations quickly and easily by performing an automated scan that returns a score based on a company's predicted inherent risk and geographical footprint. It also provides alerts for potential relationships to entities banned by emerging regulations such as NDAA 889.

File Integrity Assurance
Trojanized patches are not new but have gained greater recognition as an attack vector that must be actively guarded against after being used in the SolarWinds SUNBURST attack. File Integrity Assurance provides real-time patch source verification and patch integrity validation, providing another layer of protection for software updates.

Managing Vendors at Scale
Companies with large vendor populations often find that vendor data is in multiple, separate systems throughout their organization. This makes it difficult to get their arms around the scope of their supply chain.

"Our previous model limited the number of vendors," said Jeff Tso, Product Manager at Fortress. "Fortress is removing constraints on the number of vendors listed in the Fortress Platform so risk managers can have insight into the entire population of vendors that do business with their organization in a single location."

About Fortress
Fortress currently secures over 30% of the US power grid and serves US Government agencies and contractors to deliver supply chain risk management solutions. "We are the only solution in the market to provide end-to-end supply chain risk management, at scale, with automation. Our nation's critical infrastructure is under attack, and many organizations are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges from advanced persistent threats, geopolitical competition, and regulatory changes. Fortress is here to keep our nation's lights on," said Alex Santos, CEO and Cofounder of Fortress Information Security.

For more information, contact Adam Benson at [email protected] or 202.999.9104 or Nick Noll at [email protected] or 205.383.5595.

SOURCE Fortress Information Security