Companies' Strategies for Securing Their Business Alliances in the Supply Chain Realm
In today's interconnected business world, supply chains have become a prime target for cyberattacks. Criminals are increasingly aware of the opportunities presented by supplier relationships, and a robust supply chain security strategy is essential to respond faster than the attackers.
The four-pillar model for building a supply chain defense strategy is a comprehensive approach to address this challenge. This model includes External Attack Surface Management (EASM), effective third-party remediation, supplier influence and governance, and threat intelligence and prioritization.
EASM is a key component of this model. It involves deploying EASM tools to continuously scan suppliers' external surfaces and identify real-time vulnerabilities. This proactive approach allows businesses to react quickly to emerging risks, before attackers can exploit them.
However, traditional vulnerability management leaves a critical gap by scanning internal environments and essentially ignoring the external attack surfaces where supply chain compromises begin. Effective third-party remediation bridges this gap by using technical insights from EASM to drive business conversations that lead to change.
Supplier influence and governance is another crucial pillar. It involves classifying suppliers based on their business dependency and potential impact, and establishing documented processes for remediating compliance violations and a clear, verifiable offboarding process. This ensures that suppliers are held accountable for their security practices.
Threat intelligence and prioritization is the fourth pillar. It provides up-to-date information about how attackers are actually exploiting supplier vulnerabilities, transforming EASM results from generic vulnerability data into targeted threat scenarios. This allows businesses to focus on the most critical threats and allocate resources effectively.
Metrics such as time from vulnerability discovery to supplier onboarding, suppliers' remediation rates, and reduction in realizable attack paths over time should be tracked to measure the effectiveness of the program. Integrating threat intelligence feeds that uncover current tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of attackers targeting supply chain relationships is also essential.
Attackers don't necessarily need known security vulnerabilities (CVEs) to gain access; they identify unregistered weaknesses and exploit them to move within connected systems. Recent supply chain attacks, such as those on SolarWinds, Kaseya, and Okta, have been successful because they targeted the most privileged connection points in the supply chain, bypassing CVE-based defenses.
Effective supply chain security should map complete attack paths from suppliers' vulnerabilities to critical resources, showing which external vulnerabilities pose a real threat to business operations. Clear escalation paths should be established from the security team to third-party relationship managers for crucial conversations with suppliers.
By implementing the four-pillar model, businesses can strengthen their supply chain security, protect their sensitive systems, and respond swiftly to emerging threats. A robust supply chain defense strategy is no longer an option but a necessity in today's digital world.
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