What Is a Supply Chain Attack? How to Mitigate

In today’s interconnected digital economy, supply chain attacks are increasingly threatening the resilience and integrity of business processes around the world. A sophisticated form of cybercrime, supply chain attacks are a cybersecurity threat where attackers target vulnerabilities within a company’s supply chain to compromise systems or data. By infiltrating third-party vendors, suppliers or service providers, malicious actors can introduce malware or exploit weaknesses, potentially affecting multiple organizations simultaneously. Analysts believe that by 2026, cyberattacks targeting software supply chains alone will cost the global economy $80.6 billion.

This article explores what companies need to know about supply chain attacks and what they can do to mitigate the risk of either triggering such an attack on their customers or getting ensnared by an incident impacting their vendors.

What Is a Supply Chain Attack?

A supply chain attack is a type of cyberattack in which a criminal targets a weakness in one company’s technology systems — be they software, databases, hardware or network connections — in order to steal from or otherwise attack a different company, typically a customer or partner of the initial victim. From their earliest iterations, supply chain attacks have been a quick-and-dirty way for the bad guys to find the path of least resistance into well-defended but juicy targets. Rather than attack a solidly protected company network, it’s often much easier for cybercriminals to compromise one of that company’s suppliers that just so happens to have a trusted connection into the fortified network, thereby sneaking their way into their intended target’s systems.

Some of the earliest examples of these classic third-party vendor attacks unfolded over a decade ago against big-box retailers Target and The Home Depot, both of which had record-breaking amounts of customer information stolen due to the weaknesses of their suppliers’ systems. Since then, many more cybercriminals have gravitated toward this style of cyberattack, and they’ve also developed more sophisticated methods along the way. Multiparty supply chain attacks are common now, and they’re especially devastating when the upstream victim is a technology provider that has many downstream customers that can be swept up into an attacker’s schemes with a single compromise.

Additionally, one of the most dangerous and fastest growing types of supply chain attacks is the software-based attack. Here, cybercriminals take advantage of the fact that most software isn’t hand-coded but instead is comprised of reusable components and software libraries shared widely in online open-source repositories. When attackers find a vulnerability to exploit or the opportunity to directly inject malicious code into one of these commonly shared components, they can cast a much wider net than if they target a single piece of software at a time. In fact, one recent study shows that from 2020 through 2023, there was a staggering 1,300% increase in software supply chain cybersecurity threats found in open-source repositories.

Key Takeaways

Supply chain attackers target weaknesses in one company’s systems — whether software, hardware or network connections — to attack one or more of that company’s customers or partners.
Software supply chain attacks are on the rise, as attackers look for vulnerabilities in open-source components or libraries that are shared with tens of thousands of applications at a time.
Companies need better visibility into the security posture of their suppliers and should closely manage the software components in their systems to adequately manage supply chain attack risks.

Supply Chain Attack Explained

In today’s digital economy, companies are more connected than ever to the systems of third-party vendors and partners. Companies share data, information and application functionality, and they often reuse software components or share cloud assets with their suppliers. This level of integration and connectivity has enabled the rapid evolution of robust digital ecosystems and has greased the skids for innovation that improves operational efficiency and boosts the bottom line. But these connections and technological dependencies also introduce serious cyber risk in the process. Research shows that 41% of organizations that have suffered a material cyber incident in the last year say their problem was caused by a third party.

Supply chain attacks can take shape in a number of ways, but most of them fall into at least one of the following general vectors in which attackers:

Use a third party’s less secure systems or connections to make it easier to attack their actual target’s systems, such as when attackers target online customer or partner portals to attack every company using that portal.
Notice that their initial victim of a first-party cyberattack has third-party access to systems of one or more other organizations, allowing criminals to extend their attacks to these targets of opportunity, such as when attackers compromise a large enterprise system and stumble upon a close integration with a customer using insecure software.
Inject malicious code into software or a website used by many companies to infect multiple victims simultaneously, such as when cybercriminals maliciously sabotage open-source components commonly used by many companies to develop software.
Target a cloud services or other technology provider to gain access to or attack numerous companies at once, especially those providers that use remote monitoring and management utilities that tap into customer systems.

Cybercriminals can mix and match these attack vectors in endless combinations to help them carry out clever and effective supply chain attacks.

Supply Chain Attack

The common denominator of these patterns is the abuse of digital trust conferred from one party to another. Whether it’s the trust that a customer places in its cloud provider to safely host its servers, a business places in its contractors when it gives them network credentials or developers place in an open-source library that they use to compile new applications, these relationships can be exploited if they’re not appropriately protected and governed.

Consider some of the following common connections and dependencies that frequently arise in today’s interconnected digital business landscape.

Business Impact of Supply Chain Attacks

Whether a company is an upstream victim that a supply chain attacker infiltrates to get at its customer base or a downstream target that’s been breached due to a compromise of an insecure third party, supply chain attacks can wreak significant damage. Some studies have shown that cybersecurity incidents caused by supply chain attacks cost 17 times more to remediate and manage than first-party breaches. The fallout can be both costly and long lasting, inflicting such consequences as:

Business interruption: Whether due to software supply chain attacks, supply chain ransomware, distributed denial of service attacks against cloud service providers or any number of variations thereon, supply chain attacks cause expensive business interruptions and downtime. This impact can be particularly acute when the supplier provides services that power critical business applications or machinery.
Sensitive data exposure: Supply chain attacks are often a way for cybercriminals to scale up their efforts to obtain sensitive, personally identifiable information, such as credit card data, Social Security numbers and healthcare specifics, from a number of companies at once. When a company’s data is stolen due to a breach of their supplier’s network, the company typically is still on the hook for all liability just as if it were a first-party breach.
Intellectual property leaks: Intellectual property risks are particularly high, due to the amount of information-sharing and integration that companies engage in with their partners, suppliers and services providers. Supply chain attacks can expose proprietary information about products, processes or inventions that third parties might have access to during the course of collaboration.
System instability and integrity issues: Software supply chain attacks can cause system instability and integrity issues that can be difficult to trace. When a supply chain attacker manages to infect developer tools with malicious code, for example, all of the software a developer produces becomes suspect and could come preloaded with bugs that could cause systems to malfunction.
Compliance, legal and reputational damage: Businesses face huge compliance, legal and reputational consequences for supply chain breaches, particularly when they’re the company that triggers a widespread event that ripples across their customer base.

Notably, many companies need to worry not only about ensuring that their suppliers don’t put them at risk of an attack, but also about protecting their own internal systems and connections to make sure they don’t trigger a supply chain incident that will impact their customers. In fact, one recent study by SecurityScorecard reported that Global 2000 companies face significant concentrated risk due to their interdependence, with 90% acting as vendors to each other.

Identifying Vulnerabilities Within the Supply Chain

The modern business world is more vulnerable to supply chain attacks than ever. The SecurityScorecard study showed that 99% of Global 2000 companies are directly connected to vendors that have had recent breaches. The crux of the problem for businesses is, first, figuring out when those breaches are relevant to them and then identifying the weaknesses — in software, digital connections and integrations — that could lead to sweeping supply chain attacks in the future.

Unfortunately, more than half of organizations today have an insufficient understanding of the cyber vulnerabilities that exist within their supply chain. In order to effectively pinpoint vulnerabilities and risks within vendor environments, companies need to implement third-party risk management as a part of their broader supply chain management practices. When companies do business with dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of vendors at once, there needs to be a programmatic approach to assessing and managing the cyber risks posed by these vendors, many of which are provided access to company documents and systems. The hard reality is that 60% of companies today have no technological way to continuously monitor the state of flaws on their vendors’ systems. Even among those that do monitor for third-party risk, they’re typically monitoring a mere 33% of their suppliers.

Setting up a program and the relevant technology to track third-party risk is especially important when doing business with cloud providers, technology service providers, software and hardware vendors and data-processing partners. But even non-tech vendors present significant risk. In this day and age, every business relationship has some kind of technical component to it, which opens companies to risk. Companies need monitoring tools that help them track the levels of permission they give to contractors and vendor employees, as well as the risks incurred when they integrate platforms and applications with those of their partners and vendors.

In the meantime, on the software front, companies need greater visibility into the software dependencies they embed within their internal systems. This requires strong application security testing, as well as effective use of software bills of materials and software composition analysis tooling, which provide visibility for development and software asset management teams.

Key Types of Supply Chain Attacks

Supply chain attacks are growing not only in rate of occurrence but also in variety, as attackers become more savvy about how to pick apart vendor and partner relationships in order to infect and steal from companies with the least amount of effort and investment necessary. As a result, supply chain attacks are frequently included among the list of more traditional supply chain challenges, such as demand forecasting and efficient inventory management, as a crucial concern for maintaining business continuity and resilience.

Because of the reach they have into the software and systems of the companies they serve, IT providers and tech product companies are the most targeted upstream companies in supply chain attacks. One recent study showed that about half of supply chain attacks in 2024 began this way. But technology companies aren’t the only target — some 22 of 25 major industry sectors have had companies singled out as the upstream victim in at least one supply chain attack in 2024. Below are the main types of supply chain attacks companies should be aware of and prepared for.

Software-Based Attacks

A recent study showed that so far in 2024, attacks against the software supply chain have occurred at a rate of at least one every two days. Software-based attacks can take a number of different forms, including the following common supply chain attack tactics.

Malicious software updates: One of the most devastating ways for attackers to stealthily carry out a supply chain attack is to covertly compromise a software or tech provider’s infrastructure and use that access to fire off malicious software updates against that company’s customers. This was the modus operandi for attackers who orchestrated the infamous SolarWinds hack back in 2020, which compromised 30,000 public and private organizations by sending them a malicious update of SolarWinds’s Orion network management system.
Compromised software libraries: In this type of supply chain attack, malicious actors infiltrate and alter a trusted software component or library used by multiple organizations. Attackers target these widely used libraries by inserting malicious code or backdoors that, when incorporated into applications by developers, allow unauthorized access to systems. This can lead to widespread compromise across multiple organizations, as the infected code propagates through the software supply chain. Earlier this year, for example, the Python Package Index — the official repository for third-party Python software packages — had to shut down registration and new content creation for a time to deal with a compromised software library.
Infected development tools: When attackers infect software tools used by developers in their continuous development/continuous integration (CI/CD) software development pipelines, they can frequently subvert software at its source. These kinds of attacks are infrequent and hard to trace. They can be used to insert malicious code and backdoors directly into software. One example of such an attack was the mass exploitation of a flaw in a CI/CD tool called TeamCity, which in 2024 was found to be used widely by attackers to create thousands of rogue admin accounts in developer environments worldwide.
Infected system administration tools and system utilities: Supply chain attackers also love to target commonly used system admin tools and third-party utilities to worm their way into many organizations at once. This is exactly what an attacker did recently in the widespread XZ Utils attack, where the rogue actor convinced a single Linux developer to allow them to join as a maintainer of the XZ Utils utility, used in popular versions of the Linux open-source operating system, and then abused those privileges to install a backdoor within the widely used utility.
Magecart attacks: Magecart, which targets online shoppers, and other ecommerce-focused supply chain attackers seek to compromise ecommerce sites in order to skim credit card and other customer information directly at checkout. This is essentially akin to a digitized version of what common thugs do with card skimmer devices to glean numbers from gas pumps and point-of-sale systems — it’s just a whole lot more efficient to siphon data at a larger scale. For example, one well-known Magecart attack against British Airways in 2018 managed to steal details of 380,000 customers simply by changing a couple dozen lines of code on its site. Not only did BA suffer reputational damage and incident response costs, but it was also forced to pay a hefty $229 million fine lodged by EU authorities.
Cryptojacking: In addition to stealing sensitive customer information and intellectual property, clever supply chain attackers are also devising ways to compromise cloud providers and their customers’ cloud instances and containers to steal compute power for cryptojacking operations. Cryptojacking refers to the theft of system resources in order to fuel cryptocurrency mining on the sly. One piece of research that involved sifting through images on the Docker Hub container repository found hundreds of malicious container images disguised as legit packages that were actually designed to run cryptomining in the background of the container functionality.

Hardware-Based Attacks

Attackers don’t just target software systems; many also set their sights on vulnerable hardware components, computing devices and peripherals, as well as a wide swath of Internet of Things (IoT) systems embedded into non-tech appliances, such as smart TVs and smart speakers, that when compromised provide a valuable foothold into corporate networks. The following are some of the most common hardware-based attacks.

Factory or supply chain hardware tampering: One of the broadest classes of hardware supply chain attack problems are devices and components that have been tampered with either directly during the manufacturing process or somewhere along the device’s progression through supply chain channels. These types of attacks are rare because they require physical access to supply chains. But when they do occur, they’re extremely hard to detect as they’re often carried out by nation-state threat actors. In fact, a recent study showed that, in the United States, 29% of companies have been impacted by nation-state threat actors targeting physical PC, laptop or printer supply chains.
Counterfeit hardware: Another way attackers can broaden their physical reach into hardware supply chains is by finding a way to inject counterfeit hardware components into the manufacturing assembly process. This has increasingly become a concern for defense agencies and other government bodies, which are strengthening manufacturing supply chains and standards to prevent such attacks.
Malicious hardware updates: With so much system hardware governed through online downloadable updates, it’s no wonder this is a fruitful avenue for supply chain attackers to subvert. In one such example, a crypto hardware wallet maker named Ledger saw attackers infiltrate its systems by phishing an employee. The cybercriminals subsequently used that entry point to compromise the company’s developer environment by embedding a wallet-draining payload into software module updates downloaded by customers. Attackers stole at least $600,000 from customers as a result.
Firmware attacks: Bad actors can also target hardware supply chains by attacking devices’ firmware — the software that provides low-level control for a device’s specific hardware, enabling it to function and perform its intended tasks. Oftentimes, firmware can be insecurely implemented and vulnerable to hard-to-detect attacks. For example, last year security researchers found a firmware vulnerability called LogoFAIL that affected 95% of computers, making it possible to inject malware that loads during startup on these systems. Users should make sure their computer firmware is up to date to protect against LogoFAIL exploits.
IoT device attacks: An IoT device supply chain attack is a cybersecurity threat that targets vulnerabilities in the manufacturing, distribution or update processes of IoT devices. Attackers exploit weaknesses in the supply chain to insert malicious code, backdoors or hardware modifications into IoT devices before they reach end users. This can happen at various stages, such as during component sourcing, firmware development or even during software updates. Once compromised, these devices can be used to steal data or launch further attacks. The widespread nature of IoT devices and their often limited security features make them attractive targets for such attacks, which are particularly dangerous because they can affect a large number of devices simultaneously and are difficult to detect. One such vulnerability, recently found in a component of the ThroughTek Kalay platform used by 100 million different IoT devices worldwide, exposed devices, from security cameras to baby monitors, to widescale attacks.

Third-Party Vendor Attacks

Classic third-party vendor attacks first made headlines over a decade ago when big-box retailers Target and The Home Depot had tens of millions of customer records stolen due to the cybersecurity weaknesses of their suppliers. The most recent numbers show that 61% of companies have experienced a third-party data breach or cybersecurity incident in the last year, a rate of incidence that has risen threefold since 2021. Here are some of the most common types of third-party vendor attacks.

Vendor compromise: When attackers are able to compromise a large vendor of any type, they can often leverage the access these companies have to customer systems through integrations, overly permissive guest credentials and even access to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to start doing big damage to downstream companies in the supply chain. In this way, suppliers can expose their customers to data breaches, intellectual property theft and other expensive repercussions. For example, in 2022, Toyota Motors had to suspend operations across 28 production lines in 14 plants for at least a day when one of its plastic parts vendors was hit by a malware infection that carried over into the car manufacturer’s systems.
Service provider breach: IT managed service providers and cloud service providers have an incredible amount of permission to make changes to customer systems and a high degree of connectivity into their customers’ technology infrastructures. Cybercriminals recognize this and are specifically targeting these service providers to extend the reach of their malware campaigns and information theft operations. The 2021 breach of identity service provider Okta and subsequent supply chain attacks illustrates how attackers are cleverly using technological interconnectedness against the supply chain. By compromising an account in Okta’s trouble-ticking system, attackers were able to use that access to compromise accounts at many of Okta’s customers. This included customers that are themselves service providers, leading to additional attacks further down the supply chain.
Supply chain phishing: Sophisticated attackers are using spear phishing techniques — which target individuals, groups or organizations through fake messages — against companies central to digital supply chains to establish the initial compromise from which they can string together deeper footholds in companies along the chain. This is how an attacker was able to successfully hit General Electric with a third-party data breach. The attack started with the successful phishing of an employee at Canon Business Process services, which performs document processing and accounts payable for large companies, including GE.
Watering-hole attacks: Watering-hole attacks are a less sophisticated form of software supply chain attacks in which the cybercriminals compromise a website that serves as a resource for a particular group of individuals or businesses with the hopes of attacking these end users with malicious content. These websites could be industry-specific informational sites or forums, or platform portals for customers, vendors or partners of a specific commercial entity. Watering-hole attacks usually aren’t super-targeted, but they do serve criminals well in allowing them to cast a net within a specific community to install specific kinds of malware. For example, an attacker that wants to exploit a known vulnerability in a piece of equipment specific to the manufacturing supply chain might create malware targeted for that vulnerability and then situate it on a manufacturing industry forum.

16 Effective Strategies to Mitigate Supply Chain Attacks

There’s no silver bullet for protecting against or mitigating the risk of supply chain attacks. It takes a layered security approach that includes preventive measures, strong security monitoring and a swift incident response capability to deal with issues as they unfold. The following are key strategies companies can use to reduce the risk of both types of supply chain attack — either as an initial target that could put customers at risk or as the customer of a supplier that has been targeted by criminals looking for downstream victims. Adopting these strategies is an important part of establishing a broader set of supply chain best practices that can keep a business strong and resilient.

Establish a third-party risk management department: With the precipitous rise of supply chain attacks, third-party risk management (TPRM) has become an important discipline within vendor and supply chain management. A TPRM department centralizes the coordination of vendor assessment for cyber risk, prioritizes threats, assesses the company’s third-party risk across its entire supply chain and helps supply chain and legal staff develop and enforce standards for vendors. Currently, only about 54% of organizations have a centralized TPRM structure, but 90% of them say they’re moving toward centralized risk management on this front, according to EY.
Assess vendor security posture: Whether or not a company has a formal TPRM department, assessment of vendor security posture needs to be a standard part of establishing new relationships with suppliers, as well as of renegotiating contracts or initiating partnerships that will involve a company sharing network access or data with a vendor. Security posture should ideally be one of the key metrics in a broader supply chain risk management program.
Continually (or at least regularly) monitor third-party risk: Third-party risk assessment shouldn’t be a one-and-done effort. Mature companies assess and monitor third-party risk on an ongoing basis. One of the most rudimentary ways to accomplish this is through regular vendor risk management questionnaires, but these are known to be inaccurate and haphazard. That’s why many companies are turning to TPRM platforms that continually monitor not only the risk involved in a vendor’s technology infrastructure, but also risks inherent in that vendor’s vendors, also known as nth-party risk.
Develop an incident response process: Incident response planning is table stakes for any good cybersecurity program. But if companies want to tackle third-party risk and risk from other kinds of software supply chain attacks, they’ll need to fine-tune their incident response playbooks. This involves incorporating standardized processes for evaluating whether they’ve been impacted by major supply chain attack events that hit the headlines; swiftly updating open-source libraries when they’re found to be vulnerable; and quickly segregating or shutting down connected systems or data flows from third parties when exposures are announced.
Maintain an updated software asset inventory: One of the hardest parts of understanding supply chain risk exposure is the element of the unknown. Companies struggle to reduce the risk of supply chain vulnerabilities because they often don’t have a great foundation of asset discovery and classification. In order to understand where risks reside, businesses first need to know what software they’re running, including the versions and the configurations involved. Without this intimate knowledge of a company’s software portfolio, ongoing supply chain risk mitigation and incident response during an attack will be seriously hampered.
Audit shadow IT infrastructure: Companies can’t protect systems that they don’t know exist. Much in the same vein as taking a regular software asset inventory, companies need to regularly scour their networks and cloud inventory to keep an eye out for shadow IT infrastructure that could potentially expose them to supply chain risks. This is important for ensuring that connections aren’t being made to unvetted vendors; it’s also crucial for thoroughly mitigating risks in the midst of a supply chain attack.
Detect and manage shadow IT: In addition to regular audits of shadow IT, where employees use IT services without authorization, businesses can take a more active approach by investing in technology that automatically detects shadow IT assets, as well as implementing a proactive program for managing shadow IT. Part of that strategy could be providing a more flexible but guided way for employees to onboard innovative technology when business needs warrant it.
Use endpoint detection and response solutions: Whether a company experiences a first-party or third-party attack, endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions can speed up the time it takes to detect and shut down malicious behavior that can trigger a far-reaching supply chain domino effect. EDR provides a first line of defense by checking files, processes or network activity for signs of an emerging attack.
Implement effective malware prevention: Implementing effective malware prevention can be a crucial strategy for mitigating supply chain attacks because it creates multiple layers of defense against potential threats. This approach involves using advanced antivirus and anti-malware software, regularly updating and patching systems, implementing strict access controls and employing network segmentation. By maintaining a strong malware prevention posture, companies can significantly reduce the risk of malicious code infiltrating their systems through compromised software or hardware in the supply chain.
Employ client-side protection tools: Ecommerce companies and other vendors that require customers to enter sensitive information into web-facing platforms should consider implementing client-side protection tools that will help reduce the risk that they might trigger supply chain attacks. Client-side security helps protect a website’s end users from common incidents, such as Magecart and other skimming attempts, keylogger attacks and cross-site scripting.
Enforce strong code integrity policies: Whether they’re in the software delivery business or create software that their business or its customers depend on, development teams need to take strong measures to ensure that their code base isn’t being tampered with through software supply chain attacks. Implementing a secure development life cycle ensures a full slate of security testing during development, test and deployment, along with solid code signing practices.
Secure build tools and update infrastructure: In order to make sure attackers aren’t poisoning systems with malicious code at the source by infiltrating developer environments and tooling, security teams must pay special attention to the security of the CI/CD build tools and continually update the infrastructure that developers use to code, compile and push software to production. This includes everything from the cloud infrastructure that supports their build environments to the configuration of connections that facilitates automatic updates.
Integrate secure software updates into development: One of the big challenges of modern application security is the disconnect between vulnerability detection and the mitigation of risks once they’re found. In addition to requiring solid patch management for systems provided by outside vendors, businesses need robust processes to regularly update software that their internal developers manage. In particular, companies need a way to quickly assess and prioritize the mitigation of vulnerable software components that exist within their applications, which is increasing the need for effective use of software composition analysis tools.
Reduce risk from zero-day exploits: Many supply chain attackers leverage so-called zero-day exploits that target previously unknown and unpatched vulnerabilities to help them initially compromise a key supplier or move laterally among downstream customers of the first victim. Zero-day exploits are tricky because there’s no surefire way to prevent them. However, there are methods for reducing the risk of costly consequences when attackers employ this kind of activity. These include strong malware detection technology with heuristic and behavioral-based detection capabilities, as well as effective use of least-privilege access control, strong authentication and network segmentation.
Adopt browser isolation: Browser isolation can provide a strong backstop against becoming the victim of downstream supply chain activity that depends on web-based attacks, such as watering-hole and Magecart schemes. Browser isolation is a cybersecurity technique that separates web browsing activity from the local network and device, executing web content in a remote environment to protect against web-based threats and malware. This tactic can help provide a first level of defense for suppliers against the kinds of malware infections, drive-by-download attempts and phishing attacks that can potentially ensnare them in a compromise that may ripple out across their customer base.
Enable patching and vulnerability detection: Patching and vulnerability management may be the least flashy —but most important — disciplines of cybersecurity. By regularly updating software and systems with the latest security patches, businesses can close known vulnerabilities that attackers might exploit. Vulnerability detection tools continuously scan systems and applications to identify potential weaknesses before they can be exploited. These proactive approaches allow companies to address vulnerabilities quickly, reducing the attack surface available to malicious actors. In the context of supply chain attacks, these practices are particularly important as they help protect against interference from compromised software components or libraries that might be introduced through third-party vendors.

Protect Your Supply Chain With NetSuite

NetSuite Supply Chain Managementcan help prevent supply chain attacks by providing comprehensive visibility and control over the entire supply chain process. It offers real-time tracking and monitoring of inventory, suppliers and transactions, allowing companies to quickly identify and respond to potential security threats or anomalies. The system’s robust authentication and access controls help ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive supply chain data. NetSuite’s integrated approach enables better coordination among departments, reducing the risk of internal vulnerabilities.

Additionally, its advanced analytics and reporting capabilities can help detect unusual patterns or behaviors that might indicate a supply chain attack. Paired with NetSuite Inventory Management, which gives real-time views of inventory across all locations and sales channels, NetSuite Supply Chain Management makes it easier to implement and maintain consistent security protocols across the supply chain, enhancing overall resilience against cyberthreats and unauthorized access attempts.

Whether they target the software supply chain or IT service providers or simply go after nontechnical vendors with many digital ties to their customers, software supply chain attacks threaten the business continuity, process integrity and confidentiality of business environments around the world. These attacks present a major risk that vendor management and supply chain management teams must keep front of mind as they establish supply chain and cybersecurity best practices to support the resilience of their business.

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Supply Chain Attack FAQs

How is a supply chain attack carried out?

While there are many different ways for cybercriminals to prey on the supply chain, one of the most common is by compromising a vendor and then using the vendor’s digital connections to their customers’ systems to further compromise those customers.

What is an example of a supply chain attack?

One of the best known and most devastating supply chain attacks was the SolarWinds attack, where a threat actor managed to successfully attack 30,000 different public and private customers of the IT management company by sending a malicious update of the company’s Orion network management system to customer systems.

Why are supply chain attacks increasing?

Supply chain attacks are increasing due to the growing complexity and interconnectedness of modern supply chains, which provide attackers with more potential entry points and vulnerabilities to exploit across the network of suppliers, manufacturers and distributors involved in producing and delivering products and services.

What types of attacks are possible on supply chain?

Supply chain attacks can include malware injection, firmware tampering, counterfeit components, exploitation of software vulnerabilities, insider threats and compromised third-party vendors, all targeting various points in the product development and distribution process.

How many supply chain attacks have there been?

In 2023, there were 242 major breaches or exposures publicly reported that were attributed to third-party supply chain attacks, impacting 2,769 public and private entities. Additionally, estimates show that 2023 saw 245,000 software supply chain incidents strike applications worldwide, costing businesses a collective $46 billion.