Supply chains are coming under increasing attack, yet many enterprises and vendors remain poorly prepared to prevent or detect growing supply chain cyber-risks.
A supply chain attack occurs when someone infiltrates your system through an outside partner or provider with access to your systems and data.
The Target US breach of 2014 saw 70 million personally Identifiable Information records and approximately 40 million credit card records stolen in an attack via an unsecured HVAC supplier link for “billing and contractual services only”.
And Equifax suffered the most damaging breach in history after failing to patch an exploitable vulnerability in third party software. The hacker stole the credit reference data of 143 million clients, including verified employment documents and social security information.
How does this happen?
Software vendors are increasingly building on other pre-built components to complete their projects rather than building from scratch to shorten development time, although not necessarily knowing what is in the components, thus incorporating any insecure coding in the component into their own product.
“Watering hole” style attacks are attacks on product update delivery mechanisms. Whether it’s corrupting the update, spamming links to impersonation pages, DNS poisoning or click-jacking an update website, these attacks introduce malware users are unaware of.
What can be done?
Organisations need to be aware that cybercriminals are increasingly abusing “trusted” supplier links or sites to deliver their malware into well protected organisations. In addition, software supply chains need to be secured.
Agilient have experienced and highly skilled cybersecurity consultants to conduct security reviews of your and your supplier’s organisations, and provide a natural language report on any issues and advice remediation measures for the risk levels discovered.
Contact us to find out how we can assist your organisation.
Author: David Steele, Agilient Consultant