Don’t Let Your Supply Chain Be Your Weakest Link

To begin with, you must understand your own supply chain. There’s no way around this one.

A common problem is that there’s no clear understanding of an organization’s actual suppliers and partners. To tackle this, start off by going to finance – they can help here. They will know who you’re paying, and that will be a great starting point to create a list of your suppliers. Pivot from there to identify hidden dependencies and possible collaborations.

The next step is looking at what your suppliers actually interact with. What access do they have? How is data stored? How is data deleted? How are you communicating?

Depending on the type of suppliers and what they interact with, you need to create a framework or process for how you want them to comply with your needs and standards. This will include both non-technical and technical controls. Part of this mission is also defining immediate steps to take when a supplier suffers an incident as well as the vendor business continuity plan. This task is definitely more time consuming but it’s what will really make a difference when it’s rock and roll time.

Supply chain risk management is not a one-time gig. Both your supply chain and your suppliers are constantly evolving. Continuously reevaluating the supply chain is a must, and this should be both cyclical and triggered by specific events.

Use Tools to Your Advantage

Entities that need to comply with the NIS2 Directive are now forced to incorporate supply chain security into their risk management. This involves implementing systematic supply chain risk assessments, embedding cyber risk into contracts, and monitoring suppliers.

At Truesec, we believe that Threat Intelligence is a key tool for achieving this, as it provides actionable insights into supplier vulnerabilities, threat actors, and attack surfaces, allowing organizations to ensure their entire digital ecosystem, not just internal systems, is secure.

Our Managed Threat Exposure (MTE) Service includes two modules that focus on helping organizations monitor their supply chain: Vendor Breaches and Vendor Exposure Profiles.

Vendor Breaches reports on any mentions of an incident in your defined supply chain. We look for information on dark web forums, ransomware blogs and leak sites, as well as news outlets and official sources such as SEC 8-K filings. This information can help you act quickly when a company in your supply chain has been breached. Let’s take the recent Red Hat breach as an example. Our customers using Vendor breaches would get notified in the portal immediately about Red Hat being allegedly breached, creating an advantage to act quickly to reviewing accesses and similar for any interactions they have with Red Hat.

In Vendor Exposure Profiles we track and score vendors given their recent activity, we monitor to see what they expose on the internet and also check for leaked credentials. Combining these modules provide our customers with an idea of their vendors’ current external attack surface and we also graph this to see improvements or alert for deterioration.

Make Supply Chain Security Your Edge

Most organizations have a supply chain but are also naturally part of others.

Digital resilience in the supply chain easily becomes a burden, and it’s understandable. But try to change perspective: investing in supply chain security could be a commercial asset, creating trust and making you the key differentiator.