Navigating Vendor Risk Management: Bridging the Gaps

Understanding Vendor Risk Intelligence

In today's business landscape, adopting a proactive approach to vendor risk management is essential. Companies are increasingly leveraging vendor risk intelligence to monitor the security posture of their suppliers, partners, and service providers. This intelligence provides an outside-in view of a vendor’s risk by continuously monitoring for signs of trouble, such as data breaches, security incidents, vulnerabilities, or concerning changes in their security practices. By catching problems early, businesses can make smarter decisions about whom to work with and protect against risks that could spread through the supply chain.

However, this approach does not deliver a silver bullet. Many tools excel at tracking incidents in the US, Europe, and major Asian regions, but struggle to monitor other areas effectively. This creates a false sense of security for companies using vendors located in non-trackable regions. If your risk monitoring can't detect security breaches in your part of the world, you're making decisions with only half the information you need.

The Challenge of Hidden Breaches

The question then becomes: why do so many breaches remain hidden?

Why So Many Breaches Stay Hidden

Laws That Don't Require Companies to Speak Up

Let's start with some eye-opening numbers. In the Middle East and North Africa, cybersecurity experts estimate that roughly 80% of security breaches never get reported publicly. This means four out of five incidents stay hidden. Why? Many countries in these regions lack laws that force companies to disclose breaches. While Europe has strict privacy rules and US states have their own notification laws, large parts of the world have no such requirements or lack the resources and budgets to enforce them.

Nobody Wants to Look Bad

Even when companies know they've been hacked, reputation concerns keep them quiet. In many regions, admitting to a security problem is seen as detrimental to business rather than a responsible action. Companies worry about losing customers, partners, or trust in the market, so breaches are often handled quietly, if at all. This approach means that even when breaches are detected, they rarely make it into the public reports that monitoring tools depend on.

They Don't Have the People or Tools

Many organizations in Africa, the Middle East, and other developing regions simply lack enough cybersecurity staff. This results in insufficient personnel to detect threats, respond to incidents, and investigate breaches. If you don't have the people to catch a breach in the first place, it will never be reported. Studies consistently show these capability gaps, leading to fewer breaches discovered and even fewer disclosed.

Moreover, the systems and processes for reporting cybersecurity incidents are still developing in these regions. Without established ways to share information or authorities to enforce rules, there's nowhere for incident details to go, even when companies want to share them.

Monitoring Tools Are Biased Toward Certain Regions

Risk monitoring tools pull information from public sources, such as breach notifications, government filings, news coverage, and security research. This creates a built-in bias toward regions with open media, active tech journalism, and strong disclosure requirements. If a region has language barriers, limited tech news coverage, or weak enforcement of existing laws, it will be underrepresented in risk monitoring data. The threats are still there; they are just invisible to your tools.

Why This Should Worry You

Your Risk Reviews Are Incomplete

If your monitoring tool is missing incidents from entire regions, your vendor risk reviews are fundamentally flawed. You might be doing business with risky partners whose security problems simply don't show up in your feeds.

"Clean" Doesn't Mean Safe

Regions with low reporting might look perfectly safe on your dashboard. However, they are not actually secure, as their breaches just aren't visible. This false confidence is dangerous because it can lead to relaxed oversight and inadequate vetting of new partners.

Compliance Problems Waiting to Happen

If you're relying on risk monitoring to meet compliance requirements for supply chain security or data protection, these blind spots expose you to regulatory trouble. When unreported breaches eventually surface through other channels, you could face violations, failed audits, and legal problems.

Supply Chains Don't Care About Borders

Modern supply chains are global. A security problem in one part of the chain affects the whole system. When a supplier in an underreported region gets hacked, that risk flows back to you, whether it shows up on your dashboard or not. The gap in visibility doesn't eliminate the risk; it just hides it until it lands on your doorstep.

Bridging the Gaps in Vendor Risk Management

The good news? You don't have to accept these blind spots as inevitable. Companies can dramatically improve visibility by setting up a vendor incident reporting system. Implementing a formal reporting channel, rather than relying solely on public reports, can make a significant difference.

How It Works

A vendor incident reporting system gives your vendors a direct and auditable line to inform you about security problems. These incidents can then be registered, assessed, and tracked. The incident reporting process can be integrated into your vendor contracts, providing a simple, standardized way for them to notify you when something goes wrong. This ensures that, regardless of local laws, incidents will be disclosed in a timely manner.

Why It's Effective

• You Get Information Directly: Instead of waiting for incidents to possibly appear in public databases someday (or never), you hear about them straight from the source.

  
  

• Faster Response: When vendors report problems immediately, you can assess the impact, take protective actions, and adjust your security approach before a vendor's breach becomes your breach.

  
  

• Useful Details: Standardized reporting captures what you actually need to know: what happened, what got compromised, what the vendor is doing about it, and what the timeline looks like.

  
  

• Works Everywhere: Your reporting system functions the same whether your vendor is in Seattle, Cape Town, or Bangkok. You gain consistent visibility regardless of local disclosure laws.

  
  

• Clear Expectations: When incident reporting is included in the contract, vendors know exactly what's expected of them. No confusion, no excuses.

  
  

Making It Work

The key to success is simplicity. Vendors are more likely to report incidents when the process is straightforward, and expectations are crystal clear from day one. The reporting system should fit into your existing vendor management process and provide your security team with a single place to see what's happening across all your partners.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The geographic gaps in vendor risk monitoring are real, significant, and often overlooked. While monitoring tools excel at covering regions with strict regulations and robust reporting systems, large parts of the world remain invisible in breach databases. Understanding this limitation is crucial. Just because you don't see breaches in certain regions doesn't mean they're not happening. Security incidents occur everywhere; reporting systems vary.

By adding vendor incident reporting to your existing monitoring, you can fill these geographic gaps, uncover risks that would otherwise stay hidden, and make better-informed decisions about partnerships, no matter where your vendors operate. In a connected world, you need connected information. This means looking beyond the easy-to-monitor regions and finding ways to see what's happening in the places where visibility is hardest to achieve.

The real question isn't whether breaches are happening in underreported regions. The question is whether you're going to have visibility into them before they become your problem.

Connect with one of our consultants to discover how our Vendor Risk Reporting services can accelerate your time-to-value.