EdTech Supply Chain Risks: When Your Vendor Becomes the Breach Vector

The recent Dark Reading piece on third-party risks in the education sector really hits home. We often talk about securing our own perimeters, but when was the last time you audited the security posture of your SIS providers or transcript processing vendors?

The education sector is drowning in API integrations. If a vendor gets hit with ransomware—like we saw with the massive MOVEit Transfer campaigns exploiting CVE-2023-34362—that data flows directly into our environment. We are essentially trusting their patch management cycle with our student PII.

The scariest part isn't just the initial breach; it's the lack of visibility. Many vendors demand persistent VPN access or whitelisted IPs, making traffic anomalies hard to spot. We need to start treating vendor connectivity as hostile until proven otherwise.

I've been pushing for stricter egress monitoring on vendor connections. Here is a basic KQL query I'm testing to spot vendors accessing file systems they shouldn't during off-hours:

DeviceProcessEvents
| where InitiatingProcessAccountName contains "VendorSvc"
| where Timestamp between(datetime(now-1h) .. datetime(now))
| where FileName in~ ("cmd.exe", "powershell.exe", "powershell_ise.exe")
| project DeviceName, InitiatingProcessAccountName, FileName, FolderPath, Timestamp

How are you guys handling the 'vendor trust' requirement without cutting off critical services? Are you enforcing MFA for every external connection, or do you rely on IP whitelisting?