Are you safe to do business with?
Each year, businesses conduct more of their operations virtually with an increasing number of digital products and services, making the interconnected supply chain more complex. Partners of your business are not just working with you, but with your network—and you with theirs.
With all the potential benefits, digital supply chains also present serious cyber security risks. Supply chains are vulnerable to cybercriminals who can steal a wide variety of information, interrupt production, and create more opportunities for damage in a computerized network—putting all parties at risk.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains, a three-fold increase from 2021.
In the event your organization’s supply chain is attacked and systems are compromised, detection and remediation of weaknesses in the supply chain is equally important, as cyber criminals can — and do — return to breached networks. A company that does not make a thorough forensic study of an incident could easily be subject to a second attack or demand for payment.
Because of this, more and more customers are expressing concern about cybersecurity (or the lack of it) in the digital ecosystem, and they are making business decisions based on those concerns. To stay competitive and secure, companies of all sizes need to better understand the expanding digital supply chain ecosystem and develop a strategy for monitoring it.
Meeting the challenge of digital supply chain security
Nearly every organization is operationally dependent on a robust supply chain and a variety of traditional and non-traditional vendors and customers that often have direct access to business systems and data.
Each endpoint, application and network component that enables the supply chain represents a potential cyber security threat. Although creating a plan for every possible breach scenario for every endpoint sounds impractical for many businesses, it is essential to define the general landscape of the company’s digital supply chain and ensure adherence to core cyber security principles.
Many organizations have turned their attention to supply chain security frameworks, such as the NIST framework. In fact, for federal agencies and contractors, President Biden’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity makes the use of a software supply chain security framework mandatory.
While cybersecurity frameworks provide a good overview of general supply chain security requirements, there isn’t a single blueprint to suit the needs of every organization. The data your organization stores, how sensitive it is, which partners have access, your company and regulatory policies, (and so on) all contribute to your unique security requirements and approach.
The “people” part of the equation
Organizations must not lose sight of the main rule of security: People are the weakest link. Cybersecurity is not just a technology problem, it’s a people, processes, and knowledge problem. Breaches tend to be less about a technology failure and more about human error.
A report from the World Economic Forum highlighted that close to 95% of cyber-attacks that have been successful are linked to a human element or error.
These risks demand new mitigation approaches that involve more deliberate risk-based segmentation and scoring, security controls and best practices, and an overall shift to resilience-based efforts.
Risk management technologies like innerActiv provide organizations an effective way to keep people at the center of their security strategy. The vast majority of security threats follow a pattern or sequence of activity leading up to an attack, and supply chains are no exception. Through continuous monitoring of user and system access, activity and data movement, a baseline of “trusted behavior” can be established to bring risks that you may not even notice to light.
At a high-level, here’s how innerActiv works:
1. Monitor user behavior based on custom corporate and compliance requirements and analyze when shifts occur.
2. Get real-time alerts and dashboards to gather evidence and detailed context of “who, what, when, why, and where” actually happened.
3. Trace and quickly isolate affected users, devices, and systems to contain scope and assess overall impact while maintaining continuous inspection.
4. Analyze history and deep forensic details to refine policies and processes to prevent similar incidents and defend against critical risk indicators.
5. Combine intelligence and risk telemetry to build resiliency and shift security posture to proactively anticipate versus react to anomalies.
Bottom line
No matter how robust a company’s cyber security may be, the interconnected nature of modern supply chains makes breaches more likely. Companies that implement a supply chain security strategy can safeguard from would-be attackers. Learn more.
