ISO 27001 Third-Party Risk Requirements: Filling the TPRM Gap

The perimeter has dissolved. A decade ago, securing your organisation meant fortifying your own infrastructure, hardening your endpoints, and training your employees. Today, your data traverses dozens, sometimes hundreds, of third-party systems, each representing a potential entry point for adversaries. A breach at your supplier becomes your breach. A vulnerability in your vendor's infrastructure becomes your exposure.

This reality is precisely why ISO 27001 dedicates substantial attention to third-party security management. The standard recognises that organisations can implement world-class internal controls yet remain fundamentally exposed if their suppliers, service providers, and business partners maintain inadequate security postures. For Chief Information Security Officers and risk managers navigating this landscape, the challenge is not simply meeting ISO 27001's documentation requirements, it is genuinely managing the risks these relationships introduce.

This article explores ISO 27001's specific third-party security mandates, examines how current TPRM solutions address these requirements, and identifies a critical verification gap that traditional approaches fail to close. We will analyse the market's leading platforms, understand their strengths and limitations, and explore why an offensive security approach provides the adversarial intelligence layer that compliance-focused tools cannot deliver.

ISO 27001 Third-Party Security Requirements: What the Standard Actually Mandates

ISO 27001's approach to third-party risk management spans multiple clauses and Annex A controls, each addressing different aspects of supplier relationships. Understanding these requirements is essential because they form the foundation for evaluating whether your TPRM programme genuinely satisfies the standard's intent or merely ticks documentation boxes.

Annex A.5.19: Information Security in Supplier Relationships requires organisations to establish and implement processes to manage information security risks associated with the use of supplier products or services. This is not a suggestion to "consider" supplier security, it is a mandate to actively manage it. The control specifies that organisations must define and agree upon security requirements with suppliers, including requirements for handling sensitive information, incident notification procedures, and the right to audit supplier security controls.

Annex A.5.20: Addressing Information Security within Supplier Agreements builds on A.5.19 by requiring that relevant information security requirements are established and agreed with each supplier. These agreements must address the nature of information accessed, the security controls suppliers must implement, and the organisation's right to verify compliance through audits or third-party assessments. Critically, this control emphasises that security requirements should be proportionate to the risk, recognising that a supplier handling customer payment data requires more stringent controls than one providing office supplies.

Clause 8: Operation addresses the operational aspects of third-party management, requiring organisations to plan, implement, and control processes needed to meet information security requirements. For third-party relationships, this translates to establishing clear operational procedures for onboarding suppliers, conducting initial risk assessments, defining service level agreements with security metrics, and maintaining ongoing visibility into supplier security performance. Clause 8 is where the theoretical requirements of Annex A controls become practical, documented processes.

Clause 9: Performance Evaluation mandates that organisations monitor, measure, analyse, and evaluate their information security performance, including the performance of suppliers. This is perhaps the most challenging requirement for third-party risk management because it demands continuous evaluation, not point-in-time assessments. An annual questionnaire does not satisfy Clause 9's intent. The standard expects organisations to maintain ongoing awareness of whether suppliers continue to meet security expectations as their environments, services, and threat landscapes evolve.

For organisations still transitioning from ISO 27001:2013, it is worth noting that these requirements appeared in the previous version as A.15.1.1: Information Security Policy for Supplier Relationships and A.15.1.2: Addressing Security within Supplier Agreements. The 2022 version renumbered and refined these controls, but the fundamental obligation remains unchanged: organisations must actively manage supplier security risks, not simply document that they asked about them.

The critical insight across all these requirements is that ISO 27001 emphasises verification and continuous monitoring, not documentation theatre. The standard expects organisations to independently validate that suppliers maintain appropriate security controls, detect when supplier security postures degrade, and respond when suppliers experience incidents that could impact the organisation. This distinction between compliance documentation and genuine risk management becomes crucial when evaluating TPRM solutions.

Current TPRM Market Landscape: How Leading Platforms Approach Third-Party Security

The third-party risk management market has matured significantly over the past decade, driven by high-profile supply chain breaches and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. Four platforms have emerged as market leaders, each bringing different strengths to the challenge of managing supplier security risks. Understanding what these solutions offer, and critically, what they do not, provides essential context for organisations building comprehensive TPRM programmes.

BitSight: Security Ratings and Predictive Intelligence

BitSight pioneered the security ratings approach by translating complex cybersecurity data into FICO-like scores that executives could instantly understand. The platform continuously scans publicly accessible infrastructure, analysing DNS configurations, SSL certificates, open ports, and patching cadence to generate objective security ratings for thousands of organisations. Rather than relying on suppliers to self-report their security postures, BitSight observes what is externally visible and derives risk scores from these observations.

In April 2025, BitSight significantly expanded its capabilities by launching Identity Intelligence, which tracks over 1 billion credentials weekly across underground forums, marketplaces, and breach databases. This addition, powered by their December 2024 acquisition of threat intelligence leader Cybersixgill, provides organisations with visibility into compromised credentials before they are weaponised. BitSight now monitors clear, deep, and dark web sources, tracking credential exposure across paste sites, instant messaging applications, and underground marketplaces.

BitSight's particular strength lies in its predictive analytics and fourth-party risk identification. The platform uses analytical forecasting to estimate future security trajectories, helping organisations identify suppliers whose security postures are likely to degrade before incidents occur. The fourth-party monitoring extends visibility beyond direct suppliers to their suppliers, recognising that breaches often occur several steps removed from your immediate vendor relationships.

However, BitSight's approach remains fundamentally reactive to data that has already been exposed. The platform detects credentials after they appear on dark web marketplaces and identifies vulnerabilities that are already externally visible. For organisations seeking to understand undisclosed breaches or historical exposures that suppliers have not remediated, BitSight provides partial visibility rather than comprehensive adversarial intelligence.

SecurityScorecard: Executive-Friendly Ratings and Broad Coverage

SecurityScorecard adopted a different approach to security ratings, using a familiar A-F letter grading system that resonates with executives who may lack deep technical expertise. The platform draws from open sources, proprietary data collections, and dark web monitoring to generate scores across ten risk categories, including network security, DNS health, patching cadence, and endpoint security. This categorical breakdown allows organisations to understand not just that a supplier has security issues, but specifically where those issues exist.

SecurityScorecard's dark web monitoring capabilities are substantial, tracking over 7 billion leaked credential and personally identifiable information databases. The platform monitors criminal marketplaces where stolen data is organised by industry, company size, and data type, as well as exclusive dark web forums and private hacker channels to uncover cybercriminal tactics and tools. SecurityScorecard employs human threat analysts alongside automated monitoring, tracking threat actor behaviour patterns to provide context around emerging risks.

The platform's strength lies in its simplicity and executive-friendly reporting. Security leaders can quickly communicate supplier risks to boards and executive teams using the letter grade system, which provides an intuitive risk indicator without requiring technical translation. SecurityScorecard's broad coverage, monitoring millions of organisations globally, means that organisations can quickly assess potential suppliers without requiring their cooperation or participation.

Yet SecurityScorecard shares BitSight's fundamental limitation: it monitors what has already been exposed rather than what attackers could discover through active reconnaissance. The platform excels at detecting known credential leaks and publicly visible vulnerabilities, but it cannot reveal undisclosed breaches or comprehensive dark web footprints that include historical data exposures suppliers may not even be aware of.

UpGuard: Real-Time Monitoring and AI-Powered Triage

UpGuard differentiated itself by focusing on near real-time visibility, completing full vendor scans every 24 hours rather than weekly or monthly cycles. This daily refresh rate provides organisations with significantly faster detection of security posture changes, reducing the window between when a supplier's security degrades and when the organisation becomes aware of it.

The platform's dark web monitoring spans ransomware leak sites, underground forums, infostealer malware logs, GitHub repositories, paste sites, and messaging platforms like Telegram and Discord. UpGuard monitors for compromised passwords, credentials, intellectual property, and confidential data across hidden areas of the internet. What distinguishes UpGuard's approach is its AI-powered threat analyst, which filters and prioritises dark web signals to surface high-confidence threats whilst reducing false positives that plague many monitoring solutions.

UpGuard also emphasises ISO 27001 and NIST framework alignment, making it particularly attractive for organisations with strong compliance requirements. The platform's assessment workflows include pre-built questionnaires aligned to these standards, streamlining the process of documenting supplier compliance with recognised security frameworks.

Despite these strengths, UpGuard's monitoring remains focused on detecting credentials exposed in third-party data breaches and malware infections that have already occurred. The platform excels at rapid detection and AI-driven prioritisation, but like its competitors, it operates from a detection perspective rather than an adversarial reconnaissance perspective. It alerts organisations to what has been compromised, not to the broader attack surface and historical exposures that attackers research when selecting and planning attacks against suppliers.

OneTrust: GRC Integration and Workflow Automation

OneTrust approaches third-party risk management from an entirely different angle, focusing on governance, risk, and compliance workflow orchestration rather than technical security monitoring. The platform automates vendor lifecycle management, handling everything from initial due diligence through ongoing compliance monitoring, contract management, and offboarding. OneTrust excels at managing the administrative complexity of TPRM programmes, particularly for enterprises managing hundreds or thousands of supplier relationships.

The platform's questionnaire-based assessments use rule-based triggers to route vendors through appropriate evaluation workflows based on risk tiers, data types handled, and regulatory requirements. OneTrust integrates adverse media monitoring, sanctions checks, and watchlist screening alongside security assessments, providing a holistic view of vendor risk that extends beyond cybersecurity to include financial stability, regulatory compliance, and reputational concerns.

Critically, OneTrust does not conduct its own cybersecurity ratings or dark web monitoring. Instead, it integrates third-party cybersecurity ratings from providers like SecurityScorecard, allowing organisations to incorporate external security assessments within their broader GRC workflows. This integration approach makes OneTrust powerful for managing the compliance and documentation aspects of TPRM but entirely dependent on external providers for actual security intelligence.

OneTrust's strength is workflow automation and documentation management, making it invaluable for demonstrating compliance with ISO 27001's requirements for supplier agreements, risk assessments, and performance evaluations. However, it provides minimal independent security visibility, relying instead on vendor self-reporting through questionnaires and external rating services for technical assessments.

What These Platforms Share in Common

Despite their different approaches and emphases, the leading TPRM platforms share several fundamental characteristics that define the current market paradigm. They all conduct external or perimeter scanning, analysing publicly visible infrastructure like DNS records, SSL certificate configurations, open ports, and externally accessible services. They all generate security ratings or grades based on this observable data, translating technical findings into executive-friendly risk scores.

Every platform incorporates questionnaire-based assessments where vendors self-report their security controls, policies, and practices. Whilst automated workflows and pre-built questionnaires have improved efficiency, the fundamental reliance on vendor cooperation and self-attestation remains. They all monitor for credential leaks on the dark web, but this monitoring focuses primarily on detecting credentials after they appear in breach databases, marketplaces, or paste sites.

Most importantly, these platforms all approach third-party risk from a compliance and visibility perspective rather than an adversarial perspective. They answer the question, "Does this supplier meet our security requirements and have they been breached?" rather than "What would an attacker discover if they targeted this supplier today?" This distinction is not merely semantic, it represents a fundamental gap in how organisations verify supplier security.

The Verification Gap: What Traditional TPRM Misses

ISO 27001's Clause 9 requires organisations to continuously evaluate supplier security performance, implying a depth of visibility that goes beyond periodic questionnaires and externally observable security postures. Yet the traditional TPRM approach creates a verification gap, a space between what organisations believe they know about supplier security and what adversaries actually know.

Undisclosed Breaches and Detection Lag

When a supplier experiences a data breach, there is often a significant lag between the initial compromise, the supplier's discovery of the breach, internal investigation, and eventual disclosure to customers. During this window, which can span weeks or months, the compromised supplier continues to handle your organisation's data whilst adversaries potentially maintain persistent access to their systems. Traditional TPRM solutions detect breaches only after stolen data appears on dark web marketplaces or breach databases, by which point the damage has often already occurred.

More problematic are undisclosed breaches, incidents where suppliers either remain unaware of compromises or choose not to report them due to reputational or regulatory concerns. These breaches may never appear in the data sources that traditional TPRM platforms monitor, yet the compromised data and access credentials remain available to adversaries who know where to look. An organisation relying solely on questionnaire responses and external scanning has no mechanism to detect these undisclosed compromises until they experience a direct incident.

Incomplete Dark Web Footprints

Whilst leading TPRM platforms monitor dark web sources for credential leaks, their coverage focuses primarily on specific data types: username and password combinations, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and similar structured data. This represents only a fraction of what exists in dark web repositories about any given organisation.

Adversaries conducting reconnaissance before targeting a supplier examine a much broader footprint. They research historical breach data that may be years old but still contains valid architectural information about the supplier's infrastructure. They review forum discussions where former employees or disgruntled insiders have shared details about security practices, network configurations, or access procedures. They analyse code repositories where developers may have accidentally committed credentials, API keys, or configuration files. They track mentions in threat actor discussions where specific organisations are being researched or planned as future targets.

Traditional TPRM platforms do not provide this comprehensive view of a supplier's dark web footprint. They alert organisations to specific, high-confidence compromises like credential pairs, but they do not reveal the accumulated intelligence about a supplier that adversaries have gathered over time. This is what is meant by "skeletons in the closet," historical exposures and accumulated intelligence that still pose risks even if they have not recently appeared in breach databases.

Historical Exposures and Unmitigated Risks

A supplier may have experienced a breach three years ago, disclosed it, and assured customers that the incident was contained and remediated. Traditional TPRM platforms would have alerted customers at the time, and subsequent questionnaires would reflect the supplier's claims of remediation. However, credentials or access tokens from that historical breach may still exist in dark web repositories, available to any adversary who searches for them. If the supplier did not force password resets across all systems, rotate all API keys, or revoke all access tokens, those historical credentials remain valid attack vectors.

External scanning and security ratings cannot detect whether historical credentials have been fully invalidated. Questionnaires rely on supplier self-reporting about remediation completeness. An offensive security approach that actively searches dark web repositories for all historical exposures related to a supplier provides the independent verification that traditional methods cannot.

The Attacker's Reconnaissance vs Compliance Visibility

Perhaps the most significant verification gap is the fundamental difference between what compliance-focused tools reveal and what adversaries discover through reconnaissance. Compliance tools answer the question, "Does this supplier implement security controls we consider adequate?" Adversarial reconnaissance answers the question, "What vulnerabilities, exposures, and access paths can I exploit in this supplier's environment?"

An attacker targeting one of your suppliers does not begin with a questionnaire. They begin with comprehensive reconnaissance: scanning for exposed services, searching dark web repositories for any mention of the organisation, researching employees on social media for social engineering targets, analysing the organisation's technology stack for known vulnerabilities, and identifying potential access paths through business partners or acquired companies. This reconnaissance provides a complete picture of the attack surface, including exposures the supplier may not be aware of.

Traditional TPRM platforms provide a compliance officer's view of supplier security. What organisations need, particularly to satisfy ISO 27001's intent of continuously evaluating supplier risks, is an adversary's view. This is the verification gap, the difference between knowing a supplier claims to implement adequate security and independently confirming what an attacker would find when targeting that supplier.

The Offensive Security Approach to Third-Party Risk Management

Closing the verification gap requires a fundamental shift in how organisations approach supplier security assessment. Rather than asking "Does this supplier comply with our requirements?", the question becomes "What would an attacker discover about this supplier today?" This is the essence of offensive security applied to TPRM: evaluating suppliers from an adversarial perspective rather than a compliance perspective.

What Attacker's Perspective Monitoring Means

Offensive security monitoring replicates the reconnaissance techniques that adversaries use when researching potential targets. This includes comprehensive dark web footprint analysis that goes beyond monitoring for specific credential leaks to examine all historical mentions, exposures, and intelligence about a supplier across dark web forums, marketplaces, paste sites, and code repositories. It involves tracking undisclosed breaches by identifying compromised data or credentials appearing in underground sources before suppliers report incidents.

This approach provides independent verification without requiring supplier cooperation or relying on self-reported information. Whilst questionnaires tell you what suppliers claim about their security, offensive monitoring shows you what adversaries can actually discover. The distinction is crucial because suppliers may be genuinely unaware of exposures in their environment, may minimise known issues in their reporting, or may simply lack comprehensive visibility into their own attack surfaces.

Comprehensive Dark Web Footprint Analysis

Traditional TPRM platforms alert organisations when specific credentials appear in recent breaches. Comprehensive footprint analysis examines everything available about a supplier across dark web sources: credentials from breaches five years ago that may still be valid, forum discussions where threat actors share reconnaissance findings about the supplier, code repositories where developers accidentally exposed API keys or configuration files, mentions in threat actor planning discussions, and historical architectural information from old breaches that reveals network topology or security practices.

This accumulated intelligence provides the context that point-in-time credential monitoring cannot. A supplier might have excellent external security posture today, but if they experienced multiple breaches over the past five years and have substantial exposed data still circulating in dark web repositories, their true risk profile differs significantly from what external scanning reveals. Comprehensive footprint analysis surfaces these historical skeletons, enabling organisations to make informed risk decisions based on the complete picture adversaries see.

Proactive Breach Detection and Undisclosed Incidents

One of the most valuable aspects of offensive security monitoring is detecting breaches before suppliers disclose them, or in many cases, before suppliers even become aware of them. Compromised databases, stolen credentials, and exfiltrated documents often appear in dark web marketplaces or forums weeks or months before organisations discover they have been breached. Early detection provides organisations with critical lead time to assess their exposure, prepare incident response procedures, and potentially influence how suppliers handle disclosure and remediation.

For undisclosed breaches that suppliers never report, either due to lack of awareness or deliberate non-disclosure, offensive monitoring may be the only mechanism through which organisations learn of the compromise. This independent visibility is essential for genuinely satisfying ISO 27001's Clause 9 requirement for continuous performance evaluation. An organisation cannot evaluate supplier security performance if it remains unaware of incidents affecting those suppliers.

How This Satisfies ISO 27001's Intent

ISO 27001's third-party security requirements are not simply about documentation and questionnaires. Annex A.5.19 requires managing risks associated with supplier relationships, which implies genuine understanding of those risks, not assumptions based on self-reported compliance. Clause 9's mandate for continuous performance evaluation requires ongoing visibility into whether suppliers maintain adequate security postures as their environments and threat landscapes evolve.

Traditional TPRM platforms satisfy the letter of these requirements by documenting that organisations conduct risk assessments, maintain supplier agreements with security clauses, and periodically review supplier security. However, they do not fully satisfy the spirit of these requirements because they provide limited independent verification of what suppliers claim and minimal visibility into undisclosed or unknown compromises.

Offensive security monitoring fills this gap by providing the independent, continuous visibility that ISO 27001's requirements imply. Rather than asking suppliers if they have been breached and trusting their responses, organisations can independently verify whether compromised data from suppliers exists in dark web repositories. Rather than conducting annual security reviews based on questionnaire responses, organisations maintain ongoing awareness of suppliers' actual security postures from an adversarial perspective.

Introducing Rivanorth Oko: Adversarial Intelligence for TPRM

This is where Rivanorth Oko provides the adversarial intelligence layer that traditional TPRM platforms cannot deliver. Whilst platforms like BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and UpGuard excel at compliance workflows, external scanning, and detecting known credential leaks, Rivanorth Oko monitors your third parties from an attacker's perspective. The platform discovers undisclosed breaches by tracking compromised data appearing in dark web sources before suppliers report incidents, analyses comprehensive dark web footprints to reveal all historical exposures and accumulated intelligence about suppliers, and provides independent verification of supplier security postures without relying on questionnaire responses or vendor cooperation.

For organisations that need both compliance documentation and genuine security intelligence, the solution is not replacing existing TPRM platforms but complementing them with offensive security monitoring. OneTrust or similar platforms can manage the GRC workflows, questionnaires, and contract administration. SecurityScorecard or BitSight can provide security ratings and external scanning. Rivanorth Oko adds the adversarial intelligence layer, showing you what hackers see when they target your suppliers.

This layered approach satisfies both the compliance requirements and the risk management intent of ISO 27001. You can demonstrate to auditors that you conduct risk assessments, maintain supplier agreements, and review supplier performance (satisfying documentation requirements). Simultaneously, you maintain independent visibility into what adversaries actually know about your suppliers, enabling you to manage genuine risks rather than simply documenting compliance activities.

Implementing a Comprehensive TPRM Programme

Building a TPRM programme that genuinely satisfies ISO 27001's requirements whilst managing real-world supplier risks requires a layered approach that combines compliance documentation with adversarial intelligence. Neither traditional platforms nor offensive monitoring alone provides complete coverage, organisations need both to achieve comprehensive third-party risk management.

Risk-Based Supplier Tiering

Not all suppliers warrant the same level of scrutiny. ISO 27001's Annex A.5.20 explicitly recognises this by requiring that security requirements be proportionate to risk. A practical TPRM programme begins with risk-based tiering that categorises suppliers according to the sensitivity of data they access, the criticality of services they provide, and their integration with your infrastructure.

Critical suppliers, those handling sensitive customer data, providing essential services, or having deep integration with your systems, warrant continuous monitoring from both compliance and adversarial perspectives. Medium-risk suppliers might receive quarterly compliance reviews combined with continuous credential monitoring. Lower-risk suppliers might only require annual questionnaires unless red flags emerge in external monitoring.

This risk-based approach allows organisations to allocate resources efficiently whilst maintaining appropriate visibility across all supplier relationships. The key is ensuring that risk tiers remain dynamic, automatically adjusting when suppliers' roles change or when offensive monitoring detects significant exposures.

Continuous Monitoring and Automated Alerting

ISO 27001's Clause 9 emphasis on continuous evaluation makes ongoing monitoring essential rather than optional. Traditional approaches of annual questionnaires or quarterly reviews create blind spots where supplier security postures can degrade substantially between assessment cycles. A comprehensive programme combines several monitoring layers.

Compliance platforms provide ongoing tracking of supplier questionnaire updates, certification renewals, and audit report refreshes. Security rating platforms continuously scan external attack surfaces, alerting when observable security postures deteriorate. Offensive monitoring platforms track dark web sources in real time, detecting new exposures or mentions as they appear.

The critical element is automated alerting that brings significant changes to security teams' attention without requiring manual review of every supplier daily. Alerts should trigger based on meaningful risk indicators: sudden drops in security ratings, appearance of compromised credentials in dark web sources, disclosure of breaches affecting suppliers, or detection of suppliers appearing in threat actor targeting discussions.

Incident Response and Supplier Communication

Even comprehensive monitoring provides limited value without clear incident response procedures. When offensive monitoring detects undisclosed breaches or significant exposures affecting suppliers, organisations need predefined workflows for investigation, supplier communication, and risk mitigation.

Incident response procedures should address how quickly to contact suppliers upon detecting potential compromises, what information to share about what was discovered and where, how to assess whether the exposure impacts your organisation's data or services, and what remediation or additional security measures to require. Supplier agreements, as required by Annex A.5.20, should establish clear incident notification expectations including timelines and required information.

The challenge with undisclosed breaches detected through offensive monitoring is that suppliers may be unaware of the compromise. Organisations must balance the need to alert suppliers quickly with the possibility that premature disclosure could alert adversaries that their access has been detected. This requires nuanced incident response procedures that consider whether ongoing attacker access is likely and whether the supplier has the security maturity to respond effectively.

Balancing Compliance Workflows and Security Intelligence

The practical reality for most organisations is that traditional TPRM platforms handle compliance workflows more efficiently than offensive security tools, whilst offensive monitoring provides security intelligence that compliance platforms cannot deliver. A mature TPRM programme leverages both.

Use platforms like OneTrust to manage questionnaire workflows, track supplier contract renewals, maintain audit report repositories, and document compliance with ISO 27001's documentation requirements. Use platforms like BitSight, SecurityScorecard, or UpGuard to continuously monitor external security postures, track security rating trends, and detect publicly visible vulnerabilities. Use offensive monitoring platforms like Rivanorth Oko to independently verify what adversaries can discover about suppliers, detect undisclosed breaches, and identify comprehensive dark web footprints.

This layered approach ensures organisations can demonstrate compliance to auditors whilst genuinely managing supplier security risks. The compliance platforms provide the documentation trail ISO 27001 requires. The offensive monitoring provides the independent verification and continuous visibility ISO 27001 intends.

Conclusion: From Compliance Documentation to Risk Management

ISO 27001's third-party security requirements reflect a fundamental truth about modern cybersecurity: organisations can implement world-class internal controls yet remain vulnerable through their supplier relationships. The standard's emphasis on risk assessment, continuous monitoring, and performance evaluation reveals that mere documentation of supplier agreements and periodic questionnaires do not constitute adequate third-party risk management.

The TPRM market has evolved significantly, providing organisations with sophisticated tools for managing supplier relationships at scale. Platforms like BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and UpGuard have transformed how organisations assess supplier security, replacing manual processes with continuous automated monitoring. OneTrust and similar GRC platforms have streamlined the administrative complexity of managing hundreds of supplier relationships. These advances represent genuine progress in making TPRM programmes more efficient and comprehensive.

Yet these platforms share a common limitation: they assess suppliers from a compliance perspective rather than an adversarial perspective. They answer whether suppliers meet security requirements and have disclosed breaches, not what attackers would discover when targeting those suppliers. This creates a verification gap between what organisations believe about supplier security and what adversaries actually know.

Closing this gap requires adding an offensive security layer that monitors suppliers from an attacker's perspective. This means comprehensive dark web footprint analysis that reveals all historical exposures, not just recent credential leaks. It means detecting undisclosed breaches before suppliers report them, or in cases where suppliers never report them at all. It means independent verification that does not rely on supplier cooperation or self-reported information.

For organisations serious about satisfying both the letter and the spirit of ISO 27001's third-party security requirements, the answer is not choosing between compliance platforms and offensive monitoring. It is implementing both. Traditional TPRM tools handle the workflows, documentation, and compliance reporting that auditors require. Offensive security monitoring provides the adversarial intelligence and independent verification that genuine risk management demands.

See how Rivanorth Oko provides the adversarial intelligence layer to complement your existing TPRM programme. Request a demo at rivanorth.com/contact to see your third parties from a hacker's perspective and discover what traditional monitoring misses.