Biotech Cybersecurity Solutions: The 3 Smartest Policy Updates to Reduce Risk Fast

“You don’t need perfect security to reduce catastrophic risk—but you do need the right guardrails in place. This Cybersecurity Awareness Month is your chance to audit and strengthen your core biotech cybersecurity solutions before attackers exploit gaps,” advised Josh Nichols, Senior IT Consultant at Pennant.

Auditing & Updating These Top 3 Biotech Cybersecurity Solutions Delivers Excellent ROI

Here are the top three biotech cybersecurity solutions that deliver the biggest bang for your buck, along with a checklist of activities to quickly and affordably reduce your organization’s risk.

1. Update Your Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Policy & Vendor Contracts

So much of biotech infrastructure depends on external vendors—suppliers, CROs, cloud and SaaS providers, and many others. If one vendor has weak security, it becomes a backdoor into your network or data. How big is the risk? The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that third-party involvement in breaches doubled from ~15% to ~30%, making your vendors a top cybersecurity concern.

How can you reduce that risk? Here’s a checklist of best practices to audit your existing program or implement a new one:

What to review and require:

• Add contractual cybersecurity requirements for your vendors and partners. Make it part of new contracts and prioritize contract updates for existing vendors or partners who handle your intellectual property or have system-level access (e.g., network, file transfer, or API endpoints). Gradually implement it for all vendors and partners based on priority, and update low-priority contracts upon renewal.

• Minimum cybersecurity standards: Define your baseline requirements for vendors and partners (e.g., ISO 27001 / SOC 2 / NIST CSF alignment, vulnerability scanning, patch cycles, logging, encryption). Decide which controls to require based on the vendor’s access level, and require vendors to provide evidence of contractual compliance using annual third-party audits, penetration tests, or risk assessments. Create a vendor questionnaire that helps you evaluate risk with questions such as: Are vendor access paths logged, monitored, and limited? Do you enforce unique, rotating credentials with MFA?

• 24–48-hour breach notification: Contractually require notification (ideally within 24 hours) of any incident that could impact your organization, followed by regular status updates during the investigation.

• Segmentation and network controls: Mandate that vendor connections are strictly segmented (logical or physical) and limited by the principle of least privilege. When feasible, require micro segmentation or zero-trust access.

• Data handling, return, and destruction clauses: Specify that data is used only for defined purposes and outline how vendors must securely return or delete your data (including certified destruction) and purge backups within defined time limits.

• Sub-vendor and subcontractor controls: Require vendors to impose the same security obligations on their subcontractors or suppliers that have access to their environment or hold your data.

• Insurance and liability: Consider requiring vendors to hold cyber liability insurance and include liability caps or claw-backs for vendor-caused breaches.

If you’re on the road to stronger risk management, ensure your program meets today’s best practices. If your organization lacks a robust third-party risk policy or vendor contract framework, implement one immediately. Read our third-party risk management blog for more details, or contact our team for policy guidance or recommendations for strong, automated TPRM solutions.

2. Review Your Authentication & Identity and Access Management (IAM) Policies

In the VDBIR, credential abuse remains one of the top initial attack vectors, and basic web application attacks often involve credential theft or reuse. With biotech environments frequently rely on legacy systems, service accounts, lab consoles, and shared credentials, which can be challenging to secure, here are a few ways to reduce your risk:

• Use phishing-resistant Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) everywhere: Any MFA is better than no MFA, but try to move beyond text-based MFA (which is vulnerable to fatigue attacks and SIM swapping) to stronger methods like hardware authenticators (FIDO2 keys), authentication apps, biometrics, or certificate-based MFA. Ensure all your systems—including cloud services, internal apps, and lab consoles—enforce MFA.

• Exclude sensitive IP from internal AI tools: If your organization provides internal AI tools that can search company information, ensure that sensitive data is excluded or accessible only under stricter controls to prevent inadvertent exposure.

• Apply the principle of least privilege: Use an IAM solution to define roles and ensure each user has only the access necessary for their job.

• Regularly review and update access: Audit who has access and at what level. Conduct quarterly reviews to remove former employees or contractors and adjust permissions for staff who have changed roles.

• Privileged account management: Ensure that administrator or root accounts are controlled, logged, rotated, and used only when needed. Implement just-in-time privilege escalation.

If you discover gaps in MFA coverage, privilege management, or periodic access review, make this a priority project this month. If you don’t already have an IAM product, it’s time. This is one of the fastest, most affordable, and effective biotech cybersecurity solutions. Our fractional CIOs have several preferred solutions if you need recommendations.

3. Update Your Cybersecurity Awareness & Training Program to Include AI-Threat Awareness

Human error remains one of the leading causes of data breaches, and AI is fueling even more sophisticated and harder-to-spot phishing and deepfake voice and video scams that can cause a breach or leak intellectual property.

Here are several strategies to strengthen your defenses:

• Conduct responsible AI training: Teach employees the risks of sharing proprietary data with public AI tools such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Cite real examples, such as how Samsung employees accidentally leaked source code via AI tools, to make the threat tangible. Reinforce immediate reporting of suspected phishing attempts.

• Train employees to spot AI-enabled phishing and deepfakes: Conduct regular awareness sessions and simulations to help staff identify potential attacks. Run phishing and deepfake simulations to gauge your risk and measure improvements.

• Run tabletop exercises: Simulate data exfiltration, AI misuse, or IP theft scenarios to clarify roles and refine your response playbook.

• Update your policies: Add AI security rules to your acceptable use, remote work, and data classification policies.

Employee cybersecurity awareness training is one of our top biotech cybersecurity solutions because there are easy, affordable solutions we can recommend that help transform your staff from potential vulnerabilities into active defenders.

Next Steps

Together, these three focus areas—third-party risk management, IAM, and employee cybersecurity awareness training—can help address the root causes of the majority of biotech breaches. If your organization already has basic measures in place, reviewing and tightening these controls offers a fast, efficient way to reduce risk. Strengthening contracts limits third-party exposure, robust IAM prevents credential misuse, and better training stops phishing and social engineering, all without major investments or infrastructure changes.

We hope you found this blog helpful! Please contact us if you’d like support reviewing or implementing biotech cybersecurity solutions, or if you need help with policy development, assessments, or employee training. Our friendly experts are ready to help!

This post originally appeared on %P. Quantum Sol LLC. is affiliated with Pennant Networks, LLC.