NIST AI Risk Management Framework

Prevalent partners with you to build AI policies and procedures as part of your comprehensive third-party risk management (TPRM) program in line with your broader information security and governance, risk and compliance frameworks.

Our experts collaborate with your team on defining and implementing AI and TPRM processes and solutions; selecting risk assessment questionnaires and frameworks; and optimizing your program to address AI risks throughout the entire third-party lifecycle – from sourcing and due diligence, to termination and offboarding – according to your organization’s risk appetite.

As part of this process, we define:

• Governing policies, standards, systems and processes to protect data from AI risks
• Legal and regulatory requirements, ensuring that third parties are assessed accordingly
• Clear roles and responsibilities (e.g., RACI) for team accountability
• Risk scoring and thresholds based on your organization’s risk tolerance
• Assessment and monitoring methodologies that are based on third-party criticality and continually reviewed
• Third-party AI inventories
• Fourth-party mapping to understand exposure to AI usage-based risks in your extended ecosystem
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) and key risk indicators (KRIs) for internal stakeholders
• Contractual requirements and right to audit
• Incident response requirements
• Risk and internal stakeholder reporting
• Risk mitigation and remediation strategies

Prevalent can help your organization develop a sound risk management process and understand the context of AI usage by profiling and tiering third parties, and quantifying inherent risks for all third parties – in this case the inherent AI risks. Criteria used to calculate inherent risk for third-party classification and categorization include:

• Type of content required to validate controls
• Criticality to business performance and operations
• Location(s) and related legal or regulatory considerations
• Level of reliance on fourth parties (to avoid concentration risk)
• Exposure to operational or client-facing processes
• Interaction with protected data

From this inherent risk assessment, your team can automatically tier suppliers according to AI risk exposure; set appropriate levels of further diligence; and determine the scope of ongoing assessments.

Rule-based tiering logic enables vendor categorization using a range of data interaction and regulatory considerations.

The Prevalent TPRM Platform feature a large library of pre-built templates for third-party risk assessments. Third-party vendors should be evaluated for their AI practices at the time of onboarding, contract renewal, or at any required frequency (e.g., quarterly or annually) depending on material changes.

Assessments are managed centrally and are backed by workflow, task management, and automated evidence review capabilities to ensure that your team has visibility into third-party risks throughout the relationship lifecycle.

Importantly, Prevalent includes built-in remediation recommendations based on risk assessment results to ensure that third parties address risks in a timely and satisfactory manner, while providing the appropriate evidence to auditors.

To complement vendor AI evaluations, Prevalent continuously tracks and analyzes external threats to third parties. The Prevalent platform monitors the Internet and dark web for cyber threats and vulnerabilities. All monitoring data is correlated with assessment results and centralized in a unified risk register for each vendor, streamlining risk review, reporting, remediation and response initiatives.

Monitoring sources include:

• 1,500+ criminal forums; thousands of onion pages; 80+ dark web special access forums; 65+ threat feeds; and 50+ paste sites for leaked credentials — as well as several security communities, code repositories, and vulnerability databases covering 550,000 companies
• Databases containing 10+ years of data breach history for thousands of companies around the world

Finally, Prevalent continuously measures third-party KPIs and KRIs against your requirements to help your team uncover risk trends, determine third-party risk status, and identify exceptions to common behavior that could warrant further investigation.

As part of your broader incident management strategy Prevalent helps to ensure that your third-party incident response program can rapidly identify, respond to, report on, and mitigate the impact of third-party vendor AI security incidents.

Key capabilities include:

• Continuously updated and customizable event and incident management assessments
• Real-time questionnaire completion progress tracking
• Defined risk owners with automated chasing reminders to keep surveys on schedule
• Proactive vendor reporting
• Consolidated views of risk ratings, counts, scores and flagged responses for each vendor
• Workflow rules to trigger automated playbooks to act on risks according to their potential impact on the business
• Built-in reporting templates for internal and external stakeholders
• Guidance from built-in remediation recommendations to reduce risk
• Data and relationship mapping to identify relationships between your organization and third, fourth and Nth parties to visualize information paths and reveal at-risk data

Armed with these insights, your team can better manage and triage third-party entities; understand the scope and impact of the incident; what data was involved; whether the third party’s operations were impacted; and when remediations are completed.