As Valentine’s Day draws near, many people think about relationships — with significant others, friends, employees, and vendors.
Employees and vendors? Yes — because what you don’t know about your employees and vendors can have serious consequences. This Valentine’s Day, learn more about these relationship risks and consider Babel Street solutions for continuous employee evaluation and vendor vetting.
Why continuous employee monitoring matters
Although pre-hire background checks are an important first step for any government organization, they only capture a prospective employee’s history up to that moment. How would you learn that a current employee may be susceptible to foreign influence or has committed a crime?
Often, the signs are online, and the Babel Street Risk Intelligence Platform can find them. It offers search and monitoring of huge amounts of publicly and commercially available information. A periodic search may reveal an employee’s criminal activities — committed virtually anywhere worldwide. It may also spotlight unreported foreign travel, or the types of civil issues (bankruptcy, divorce) that may make a government employee financially or emotionally vulnerable.
Dark-web searches may uncover proprietary, sensitive, or classified information offered for sale — and connect those offerings to real-world sellers. Social media investigations spot instances of employees unwittingly telegraphing their own misconduct. For example, a government employee posting photos on social media of his new expensive possessions, or an unreported foreign trip might raise eyebrows. These hidden signals can become important red flags.
Vendors have relationships, too
With massive volumes of data available, it can be overwhelming to vet a single vendor, let alone the hundreds often needed for a complex procurement. Then, there are the vendor’s second- and third-tier relationships to consider too.
Vendor vetting is every bit as important as employee vetting. Government and military supply chains are huge and complex. Agencies contracting with the wrong suppliers risk giving adversarial nations access to national defense systems, telecommunications systems, and power grids — rendering these systems vulnerable to espionage, sabotage, or shutdown.
Heavily regulated industries and commercial enterprises face significant vendor risks that can threaten their compliance, security, and reputation. In these sectors, working with unvetted or poorly vetted vendors can expose organizations to legal liabilities, supply chain vulnerabilities, and potential partnerships with entities that are subject to sanctions or embargoes.
Every unvetted vendor is a risk. Complex vendor relationships often conceal hidden ties or indirect connections that may compromise operational integrity or open doors to fraud, sabotage, or unauthorized data access. And chances are, your existing vendor vetting software tools are serving up only fragmented information about them. These tools know that United States agencies can’t do business with comprehensively embargoed countries (North Korea, Iran, Syria), and that trade with China and Russia is strictly regulated. They can flag any prospective contractor located in Syria or a Russian oil and gas CEO who is personally sanctioned.
But for deeper insight, you need Babel Street to collate and coalesce information from disparate data silos. Your existing tools can’t tell you that a C-suite member of an otherwise trusted Chinese manufacturer uses an alias to hide his ties to the government of the People’s Republic of China. Or that a long-term aviation vendor buys some of its component parts from an embargoed Russian company. Or that a low-tier subsidiary of a Turkish conglomerate, a company that produces steel and other building materials, is based in Syria. Babel Street can.
When relationships — whether with employees or vendors — can shape an organization’s security and success, continuous evaluation and thorough vetting are essential acts of due diligence. With Babel Street’s solutions, organizations can continuously monitor and assess risk, using real-time intelligence to identify potential threats or vulnerabilities as they arise. This proactive strategy helps maintain secure, transparent partnerships — ensuring people and operations are protected from unforeseen risks. Get a complete understanding of your relationships.
Happy Valentine’s Day from Babel Street.
Disclaimer
All names, companies, and incidents portrayed in this document are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, companies, and products are intended or should be inferred.