CFOs know all too well the financial risks of a cybersecurity breach, especially when an attack grinds business to a halt. But it’s not just your company getting breached that you have to worry about; cyberattacks on your vendors can also prove damaging.

A rash of widespread vendor outages are a wake-up call to finance leaders that third-party cyber risks can be just as disruptive to their business as direct attacks—and companies can do a lot more to manage that risk, according to experts.

“I think we are miles away from where we need to be in organizations managing [third-party cyber risk] and insurance underwriting for it,” Alexandra Bretschneider, cyber practice leader at insurance broker Johnson, Kendall & Johnson, told CFO Brew. “And I think there’s a lot of improvement yet to come.”

“This really is not just an IT problem,” either, according to Karen Walker, CFO of cloud security platform Sysdig. “Cybersecurity has now quickly become a strategic imperative for companies,” Walker told us. “When vendors get compromised, it’s not just the data at stake. It’s revenue, it’s reputation, and it’s regulatory exposure as well.”

Click here for more on the rise of third-party cyber risk.—AZ

Here’s a good economic data point for a change—although to be clear, it’s a reflection of a time before President Donald Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs plan (then rolled back most of them).

Prices for producers and manufacturers decreased 0.4% in March from the previous month, compared to increases of 0.1% in February and 0.6% in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed. The producer price index report also showed that wholesale pricing increased 2.7% on an annual basis, down from 3.2% in February.

This was better than experts’ predictions, according to CNN, which reported that “economists were expecting monthly prices to rise by 0.2% and to accelerate to 3.3% on an annual basis.”

The decrease in the producer price index is largely thanks to a 0.9% drop in the cost of goods, according to the BLS report. The cost of services also decreased in March, but only by 0.2%.

For more on the drop in producer prices, click here.—AZ

The Senate has voted, 52–44, along partisan lines, to confirm Paul Atkins as head of the SEC.

Atkins was an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, and is CEO of consulting firm Patomak Global Partners. He is widely expected to take a more deregulatory approach than his predecessor, Gary Gensler. In speeches, he has criticized Dodd-Frank and expressed the viewpoint that regulators, not Wall Street, were to blame for the Great Depression. Atkins, whose firm has advised digital asset companies, including FTX, is also likely to take a crypto-friendly stance.

Under Atkins, “there probably will be a foot taken off the pedal” in terms of regulation, former SEC Branch Chief Lisa Bragança told CFO Brew earlier this year. Acting SEC head Mark Uyeda has already moved the agency in a more deregulatory direction, stopping its legal defense of its climate rule and canceling 10 high-profile lawsuits against crypto companies.

Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-SC, said Atkins will “roll back harmful Biden-era policies, promote capital formation, and enhance opportunities for retail investors,” The Hill reported.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, voted against Atkins’ confirmation, noting in a letter at the time of his nomination that he has “significant potential conflicts of interest” due to his “work on behalf of corporate interests” and that he supported “several deregulatory measures that contributed to the near collapse of the banking and financial system in 2007 and 2008.”

Click here for more on the new SEC head.—CV