Supply Chain Cyber Security Risks: Top Reasons and Prevention Tips

Quick Summary: Supply chain cybersecurity risks can pose a critical challenge for your digital landscape. Understanding the different risks and mitigation techniques can help you take the right steps to protect your organization’s data and systems. This article explains the key cyber security risks from the supply chain and how you can prevent them. Keep reading to get useful information.

A supply chain is a comprehensive network of different companies, individuals, partners, and processes. Things can be very complex in a vast supply chain network. However, the use of digital technology streamlines everything and establishes smooth communication.

While the technology benefits different stakeholders in the supply chain, it also makes them susceptible to cybersecurity risks. An attacker could hack the network of your supplier or partner and gradually crawl into your systems through the common APIs or applications you might be using.

An attack on a single organization in a supply chain can result in a domino effect because they have shared information and digital solutions. So, a single data breach may pose a threat to other organizations in the supply chain.

Protecting against these threats requires a proactive approach that is not limited to strengthening your security measures, but you should also detect vulnerabilities to eliminate hidden loopholes. This combined approach will give you great results and prevent potential threats.

Checkmate All Cyber Security Risks with Advanced Vulnerability Detection and Prevention Check for Free

Top Risks to Supply Chain Cyber Security

The foundation of modern supply chains is based on digital channels that make them susceptible to various cyber security risks. Any kind of security loopholes in these channels can make them vulnerable to cyberattacks. The following are the key cyber security risks faced in the supply chain.

Malware

Malware is one of the key supply chain cybersecurity risks. Attackers can install malware on the victim’s computer, server, or device using social engineering techniques to gain backdoor access. With the help of malware, an attacker can gain access to sensitive data, control the target system, or disrupt operations.

Ransomware

It is a critical security risk that affects organizations across industries and costs millions of dollars. Ransomware is a sort of malware that locks a victim’s system or encrypts data, making it inaccessible. It demands ransom and threatens to destroy or keep data encrypted. As per IBM’s threat intelligence report, ransomware accounted for 20% of cyberattacks.

Credential Theft

Credential theft involves illegitimately obtaining the username and password to gain unauthorized access to a system or data. Attackers leverage various techniques like phishing, brute-forcing, keylogging, and more to steal victims’ credentials.

Credentials are usernames, passwords, and other secrets used for authenticating and authorizing a user with a system. If these credentials go into the wrong hands, it could result in disrupted operations and stolen data. Hence, credential theft is one of the critical supply chain cyberattacks.

Supply Chain Attacks

Supply chain attacks involve using a third-party dependency to attack a target. For example, an attacker might inject malicious code into a piece of software or code that the target depends on to enhance its application’s functionality. So, it is a type of indirect attack.

Supply chain firms often depend on many third-party services that make them more susceptible to this attack. Protecting against such threats requires high-end solutions security to evaluate risks from third-party services.

Social Engineering

Another type of supply chain cyber risk is social engineering. It is a type of risk in which an attacker exploits human psychology by tricking victims into revealing confidential information. For example, phishing is a kind of social engineering attack in which an attacker sends fraud emails to the victims. These emails lure the victims to click on attached links, which results in data theft.

Insider Threats

Organizations often undermine the potential risks of insider threats. However, it is a critical security risk for organizations, even in a supply chain network. Insider threat arises when a financially motivated or disgruntled employee reveals confidential information to competitors.

Because an employee most probably has easy access to an organization's systems and data, insider threat becomes a harsh reality. Stronger access control mechanisms can help prevent such threats.

Causes of Supply Chain Cybersecurity Threats

You have seen different types of cyber risks in the supply chain; now, let’s find out what causes these risks. There are many reasons why supply chains are vulnerable to cyber security risks. Since these risks arise from external factors within your supply chain, you must evaluate the measures and practices you follow internally whether they are sufficient to prevent cyber risks or not. Check out the following causes of supply chain cyber threats to improve your security posture

Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are security loopholes or weaknesses in digital infrastructure that attackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access to systems or steal sensitive data. Most commonly, vulnerabilities arise from outdated software components, misconfigurations, human error, and some other factors.

These vulnerabilities could expose critical information about your systems that attackers can use to hack them. They can be implementation flaws that attackers can leverage to gain access to your data. For example, improper input validation is a vulnerability that attackers can use to access data.

Hence, identifying and eliminating these vulnerabilities is essential to protecting your digital landscape from cybersecurity threats. It requires you to perform a thorough vulnerability assessment to discover hidden loopholes and prevent cyber supply chain attacks.

Poor Security Practices

Lack of encryption and stringent access controls are examples of poor security practices. Plus, not enforcing or updating data security policies is also a poor security practice. Every organization takes effective measures to protect against cybersecurity threats.

However, improper implementation of these measures or any flaw therein can make your systems susceptible to cyberattacks. Just consider a scenario where users connecting to your private network from inside your organization are trusted implicitly, but those outside the organization require authentication.

This means that any user inside the network periphery is implicitly allowed to access data without verifying their credentials. However, this security mechanism has a flaw because an attacker can gain access to data when successfully intruding into the network, bypassing the security protocols.

The attacker can easily access data due to implicit trust without going through identity verification. Hence, poor security practices pose a significant challenge for organizations. They must implement a clear security policy and proper access controls to ensure a stronger security posture.

Lack of Cybersecurity Training

Employees without training in good cybersecurity practices and pertinent knowledge are likely to fall prey to an attacker’s trick. Consequently, it will lead to compromised security of your systems, causing a data breach.

Social engineering has become a key tactic for attackers to dupe employees into revealing sensitive information. It involves techniques like phishing, which is a major security concern these days. As per Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report, social engineering, along with system intrusion and miscellaneous errors, account for 87% of all data breach incidents.

Hence, social engineering causes heavy losses to organizations. Choosing the right security strategy is crucial in this complex threat landscape. Employee training and awareness are essential to avoid such incidents.

With training and awareness programs within your organization, you can make employees understand the threat landscape and make them aware of the best practices to prevent such threats. It will help reduce human errors and make them more vigilant towards potential security risks like phishing attacks.

Spend $0 with ZeroThreat and Save Millions in Data Breaches Discover Security Risks

Best Practices to Mitigate Supply Chain Cyber Security Risks

You can defend against supply chain cyber security risks by improving your security approach with a stronger defense strategy. The following tips help you boost the security of your systems and data as well as mitigate the potential risks of cyber threats.

Zero Trust Architecture

You can mitigate cyber security threats arising from your supply chain significantly by adopting the zero-trust architecture for securing networks and systems. It is a security paradigm that focuses on continuous authentication and authorization.

This means that any user who wants to access a resource on a network or system must be authenticated and authorized every time a request is generated. This way, even if an attacker successfully penetrates a network, he cannot access sensitive resources without further authentication.

So, if an attacker tries to exploit vulnerabilities in your supply chain, your systems and data will be safe.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Another way to prevent supply chain cyber risks is to use multi-factor authentication (MFA). It adds another layer of security to protect data. In this way, if a user attempts to get access to a system or application, entering credentials is not enough, which usually happens.

This means that it is not just a username and password that a user needs to access a system or application; it also requires another security step. It can be two or more further steps. For example, in two-factor authentication (2FA), which is a kind of MFA, a user gets a secret code or OTP as the second step after entering credentials to log in to an application.

Implement Honeytokens

Honeytokens can alert you of potential security breaches. Your organization can create fake resources disguised as critical information that could seem valuable to the attacker. So, the attacker could attempt to access that resource, and if this happens, you will get a threat alert.

Consequently, you will be able to know that an attacker has targeted your network and launch an incident response plan to mitigate further risks. So, your organization can get crucial information that helps you foil a cyberattack.

Follow the Least Privilege Principle

After breaching a defense, attackers mostly look for privileged accounts through lateral movement. They know that these accounts can allow them to access sensitive data and even control the network. Here, you can leverage the “least privilege principle,” which emphasizes that every user should have access to specific resources or data only.

This means that users should have the least possible access privileges. It will prevent lateral movement because if an attacker gains access to an account with some privileges, it cannot access data or resources that a user with higher privileges can access.

Continuous Threat Assessment

While you can implement stronger security measures, you cannot completely eliminate threats unless you take a proactive approach with continuous assessments of your digital assets. As we have mentioned earlier, vulnerabilities are a common cause of cybersecurity threats in the supply chain.

So, you must regularly scan your web applications, APIs, and other assets to discover hidden loopholes. It will help you detect various web app vulnerabilities and API flaws that an attacker could exploit to breach security. By identifying and resolving these loopholes, you can build a stronger defense shield.

Build a Stronger Security Shield by Discovering and Neutralizing Threats in the Supply Chain Start Now

In a Nutshell

Managing the security of your systems and data in the context of a supply chain where a large number of parties are connected through digital channels becomes quite challenging. Your organization can be at risk if an attacker exploits vulnerabilities in one of your supplier’s systems that has access to resources on your network.

Continuously analyzing your digital assets to discover vulnerabilities can help you identify loopholes that attackers can exploit. You can promptly take action to eliminate these loopholes and secure your digital landscape, preventing any potential cyber security threat. You can use a highly reliable DAST tool like ZeroThreat to perform in-depth security testing on web apps and APIs to identify loopholes.

As an AI-powered tool, ZeroThreat can detect vulnerabilities most accurately and offer actionable reports that can accelerate your remediation process. It offers 5x faster scan results than other tools.

Just try it once; it’s free and see how it benefits you.