Technology is a constantly evolving landscape in which we adapt and progress year after year, much like the Moore's Law theory of processing speeds. On the other hand, cybersecurity gets more complicated and distinctive as software and hardware vulnerabilities start changing. This makes the digital environment for security professionals bigger and more complex. Digital Supply Chain Risk is one of the top seven cyber security trends for 2022, according to Gartner. Given the recent track record of successful supply chain hacks, CISOs and CIOs should not be surprised. The issue is, how can you successfully prepare your business to defend against a supply chain attack?
What Are the Digital Supply Chain's Risks?
Whatever definition you choose, there are a lot of threats in the digital supply chain. Physical supply chains that employ IoT, for example, are vulnerable to hacking. According to Ponemon research, although encryption is rising in areas such as freight and manufacturing, 60% of the organizations surveyed revealed partial encryption of their IoT and 61% revealed partial encryption of their IoT platforms.
Threats to a company's extended digital ecosystem, on the other hand, are even more concerning. Third-party businesses in your supply chain are not your employees; they are frequently not on-site, and you cannot demand compliance as you do with employees. This is the reason for alarm; according to the Ponemon Institute's latest Cost of a Data Breach study, data breaches committed by third parties increase the cost of a data breach by an average of $207,411. Vendor information security measures are harder to verify, take longer to detect, and may take much longer to fix.
Regardless of the fact that third-party information risk is a very serious concern, many companies are unprepared for a supply-side data breach. According to Protiviti's 2019 Vendor Risk Management Benchmark Study, only 40% of businesses have a fully developed vendor risk management process in place. A third of those surveyed said they had no risk management program or used an ad hoc risk management method.
How Can You Keep the Digital Supply Chain Secure from Risks? Knowing your extended environment isn't as simple as it seems. While you may be aware of your suppliers, you may not be aware of theirs. You can feel helpless to check your suppliers' security procedures.
If so, review your vendor management system. Traditional static third-party monitoring, like surveys, isn't adequate to safeguard your data and networks from supply chain bad actors. Static monitoring produces a snapshot of your suppliers' controls at a certain time-what if all their software is patched today, but what about tomorrow? Constant monitoring is the best method to manage third-party partnerships and secure data.