From: Wall Street Journal

By Rachael King

In a connected world, business survival depends on communicating with partners. But increasingly those same partners, which include technology services providers and suppliers, can prove to be a company’s downfall if the systems they share are compromised. With large financial firms often retaining hundreds or thousands of such connections, federal and state financial services regulators are now looking more closely at this issue, requiring firms to better understand and test the security of third-party providers.

“Everything is interconnected, probably more than most people realize, and regulators have begun to increase scrutiny,” said Vickie Miller, former chief information security officer of Fair Isaac Corp., known as FICO for its trademark credit scores. The company works with many financial services firms and has recently been asked to provide more details of its security practices. “If we have a data circuit between us and a bank, anything that compromises us should be on the radar,” said Ms. Miller, who moved to another role within the company this year.

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