Third Party

If you manage third-party cyber risk, you’ve seen it all: meaningless scorecards, black-box tools, and endless frameworks that never quite connect to business impact. Third-Party is the podcast built for the people behind the dashboards. The ones managing 5,000 vendors with a team of three. Hosted by Jeffrey Wheatman, Ferhat Dikbiyik, and Bob Maley, this show unpacks what actually works (and what doesn’t) in TPRM. No fear tactics. No buzzwords. Just unfiltered conversations, sharp insights, and the occasional roast of a really bad SIG questionnaire. If you’ve ever had to explain cyber vendor r

Third Party is a technology podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Third Party, a technology show with 0 episodes published.

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  Third Party

  Is AI the End of Humanity or Just Another Y2K?

  Sep 23, 202637 min

  Some of the people building AI are warning it could end humanity. Others say it's all hype. Meanwhile, AI agents have already escaped a testing sandbox and attacked another company's infrastructure. So is AI the end of the world, or just the next Y2K?In this unscripted, off-cycle episode, Jeffrey Wheatman and Bob Maley sit down with Black Kite co-founder and CTO Candan Bolukbas and Rock Lambros, Director of AI Standards and Governance at Zenity and a core team member of the OWASP GenAI Security Project, to cut through the headlines. They debate whether the latest warnings signal real danger or another cycle of panic. They also get into why the bigger threat may be the people using AI rather than the technology itself, and what defenders need to do now that attackers have already adapted. Then they bring it back to the question security leaders are facing: how do you manage AI risk across an ecosystem of partners and suppliers you can't fully control?In this episode, you will learn: Why today's AI doom headlines echo past panics like Three Mile Island and Y2K, and why banning AI could backfire Why the bigger AI risk may be the humans using it rather than the technology itself How AI has cut the time attackers need to turn a new patch into a working exploit from days to hours What the AI sandbox breakout that hit Hugging Face teaches defenders about using AI to fight AI Why free AI tools and API tokens can quietly expose your passwords, secrets, and source code How to treat AI as a third-party and supply chain risk, starting with where your data goes If you're trying to separate AI hype from real risk in your security program, this conversation is for you.

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  Third Party

  Are Your Vendors Lying to You?

  Sep 9, 202636 min

  Your vendor says they have MFA everywhere. They say their data is encrypted. They say the right things on every questionnaire you send. So why is there almost always a gap between what a vendor tells you and what is actually happening inside their environment?In this episode, Jeffrey Wheatman, Bob Maley, and Ferhat Dikbiyik dig into the uncomfortable space between attestation and reality. Jeffrey wants to call it lying. Bob and Ferhat push back hard, arguing most of it is bad data, missing inventory, and answers that are aspirational rather than dishonest. From there they get into the harder problem: how do you verify anything when you cannot send an auditor into Google or Amazon, and what happens to verification itself when the answers you receive were generated by AI in the first place?In this episode, you will learn: Why yes or no questionnaire answers measure compliance, not the efficiency of a control The three types of verification, from signals to behavior analysis to vendor testimony Why every signal needs a confidence level before you decide which battles to fight How to get real value from SOC 2 reports and where third-party audits fall short Why most programs are built to discover and ask questions, but never to follow up What happens to trust but verify when AI is producing the answers on both sides If your program collects a lot of vendor answers and verifies almost none of them, this conversation is worth your time.

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  Third Party

  The AI Scanner Hype Test

  Aug 26, 202637 min

  AI-powered vulnerability scanners can now find tens of thousands of flaws in a matter of weeks. That sounds like a breakthrough until you look at the other number: the patch rate is under one percent. So are these frontier models a genuine game changer, or just the latest round of marketing built on fear, uncertainty, and doubt?In this episode, Jeffrey Wheatman, Bob Maley, and Ferhat Dikbiyik pressure-test the hype around tools like Project Glasswing and the new class of AI scanners. They dig into why discovery has raced ahead of remediation, why throwing AI at the end of the process may be solving the wrong problem, and where these tools actually earn their keep today versus where the marketing gets ahead of reality. Along the way they get into prioritization, explainability, and the uncomfortable question of what happens when you can find far more than you could ever fix.In this episode, you will learn: Why the real story is the gap between vulnerabilities discovered and vulnerabilities patched Where AI genuinely helps today, from discovery and attack chaining to triage Why shifting these tools earlier in the development cycle may matter more than faster remediation How to cut through vendor AI claims using explainability as your filter Why prioritization, not patching everything, is the only way out of the deluge What security leaders should expect from these tools over the next year If you have ever wondered whether the AI vulnerability hype is signal or noise, this conversation gives you a framework to tell the difference.

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  Third Party

  Your TPRM Program Isn't Fixable

  Aug 12, 202638 min

  Your third-party risk program is probably built on questionnaires, and you already know they don't really work. So the real question is not how to make them better. It's whether you should tear the whole thing down and start over.In this episode, Jeffrey Wheatman, Bob Maley, and Ferhat Dikbiyik get honest about what it takes to rebuild a TPRM program from the ground up. They dig into why the hardest part isn't the tooling, it's breaking the mental model you've been committed to for years. Drawing on the idea of creation and destruction, they walk through what they would keep, what they would throw out, and why using AI to speed up a broken process just gets you to the wrong answer faster.In this episode, you will learn:Why incremental improvement is the trap, and when a program needs a full rebuild instead of a refreshWhat the questionnaire industry is really protecting, and what could actually disrupt itThe three things Bob and Ferhat would build first if they started from scratchWhether you can outsource a TPRM program, and where that logic breaks downWhy AI model cards may replace stacks of AI questionnairesHow to shift from assess-everybody to monitor-everybody and assess by exceptionIf you have ever inherited a program you did not build and wondered whether to fix it or start over, this conversation is for you.

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  Third Party

  You Can't Say No to Your Vendors

  Jul 29, 202641 min

  You can't actually say no to a vendor. Ask any room of CISOs how many of them have the power to walk away from a vendor relationship over cyber risk, and the honest answer is almost none. So if leverage is mostly an illusion, what actually moves a vendor to fix their exposure?In this episode, Jeffrey Wheatman, Bob Maley, and Ferhat Dikbiyik dismantle the idea that third-party risk is about power and rebuild it around something more useful: collaboration. They dig into why the questionnaire-led, finger-wagging approach fails, how to communicate risk in dollars and cents that the business will actually act on, and why the relationship you build before an incident matters far more than any contract clause after one.In this episode, you will learn: Why "saying no" was never the CISO's job, and what the real role is How to turn a contract into a collaboration tool instead of a weapon Why intelligence-led outreach beats questionnaire fatigue every time How to communicate vendor risk so business stakeholders actually respond What to do when a hard-to-replace vendor won't budge Why the first interactions with a vendor set the tone for the entire relationship If you have ever felt ignored by a vendor who has bigger customers than you, this conversation will change how you show up to the table.

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