No matter how secure an organization’s internal defenses may be, the risk created by third parties cannot be ignored. A single vendor often has connections across dozens of client environments.
Attackers exploit this interconnectedness. Rather than attacking a well-defended enterprise directly, they target a smaller vendor with weaker controls and use stolen credentials as a bridge. The MOVEit breach, which impacted hundreds of organizations via a single software vendor, illustrates how quickly third-party compromises can cascade.
“Your vendors’ passwords are your attack surface.”
Attackers don’t need to brute force firewalls or exploit zero-days when they can simply log in with a vendor’s compromised credentials. These accounts are an ideal initial access point for several reasons.
What may begin as a single compromised vendor account can evolve into ransomware deployment, customer data theft, or even large-scale fraud campaigns.
Third-party credential exposures are not only a security issue — they are also a compliance and liability challenge.
Even if the breach originates at a vendor, regulators, customers, and investors will hold the primary organization accountable.
Most enterprises already have vendor risk management programs in place. Unfortunately, these programs are built on processes that are ill-suited for the realities of modern credential-based attacks.
The result is a dangerous blind spot: while you may check the compliance box, attackers can still exploit vendor passwords to gain access. By the time a vendor breach is discovered through traditional means, attackers may already be inside your systems, moving laterally or exfiltrating data.
“Continuous credential monitoring is the missing control layer in third-party risk management.”
Closing this gap requires more than paperwork — it requires continuous, real-time monitoring. Instead of assuming vendors are secure, organizations must know whether their accounts are compromised today.
Credential monitoring works by:
With Enzoic, enterprises can identify unsafe passwords not just for their employees, but also for accounts tied to contractors, partners, and vendors. This control transforms third-party risk management from a passive compliance exercise into an active defense. For accounts within your purview, weak, reused, or compromised passwords are blocked at creation and continuously monitored thereafter. Where direct oversight of vendor accounts isn’t possible, Enzoic surfaces breach‑exposure signals that your SIEM or other correlation tools can combine with entitlements and activity data to detect suspicious behavior.
In addition, to make sure any threat is prevented before it occurs, organizations can mandate in vendor contracts that each third party implement continuous credential monitoring (for example, using Enzoic), in line with NIST SP 800-63B’s advice to check passwords against known breach lists. By embedding such requirements in contracts or SLAs (for example, requiring regular breach-scans of vendor accounts and immediate password resets on any hits) organizations make monitoring an enforceable control. This is crucial since roughly one-third of recent breaches involved compromised third-party credentials, so contractually mandating credential monitoring helps close that security gap and should be a part of any vendor review.
By uniting continuous monitoring with continuous enforcement, Enzoic closes one of the most overlooked gaps in supply chain cybersecurity, preventing vendor credentials from becoming an open door for attackers.
Many third-party risk solutions stop at detection. They may provide dashboards or spreadsheets showing which vendor accounts are exposed. But that information alone doesn’t prevent breaches.
Enzoic goes further by combining continuous credential intelligence with enforcement. Threat data is updated daily with the latest breach records and infostealer logs, aligned with frameworks like NIST 800-63B. For vendor accounts within your purview (where you manage the login flow) you can turn detection into automatic remediation:unsafe passwords are blocked before they can be exploited.
This combination of detection and prevention is what differentiates Enzoic. We don’t just show you the problem — we stop unsafe vendor credentials from becoming enterprise risk.
Third-party breaches are inevitable, but their blast radius doesn’t have to include your organization. Vendor credentials are often the weakest link in the supply chain, and attackers exploit that reality every day. To defend against this, enterprises must shift from questionnaires and audits to continuous monitoring and enforcement. Enzoic delivers that control, ensuring that unsafe vendor passwords never become enterprise risk.
What is a third-party breach in cybersecurity?
A third-party breach occurs when an attacker compromises a vendor, contractor, or partner system, and uses that access to infiltrate connected organizations. These incidents often expose sensitive data or provide attackers with a foothold inside larger enterprises.
Why are vendor credentials such a high risk?
Vendor accounts are often over-privileged, reused across clients, and more likely to appear in breach dumps or malware logs. Attackers use these credentials as an easy entry point, bypassing traditional perimeter defenses.