A secure supply chain is vital for ensuring the integrity, reliability, and resilience of products from their origin to the final consumer. It includes strategic measures to mitigate risks such as theft, fraud, natural disasters, and cyber attacks. In today’s globalized economy, the importance of a secure supply chain has never been greater. The rapid expansion of international trade has created a significant dependency on foreign supply chains. This makes effective secure supply chain management essential for safeguarding daily operations and protecting consumer trust.
Additionally, a secure supply chain allows companies to maintain compliance with international regulations. This ensures that their operations are not interrupted by legal issues or penalties related to insufficient security practices.
Cyber Attacks Targeting the Supply Chain
It was once common for companies to produce and acquire products locally. However, the global sourcing of foreign materials has led to new vulnerabilities and challenges that companies must address in their supply chains. A well-managed secure supply chain plays a key role in mitigating these vulnerabilities. It ensures that products arrive on time and stay protected from cyber threats. Supply chain attacks, particularly cyber-based ones, have become a common tactic to disrupt existing supply chains. These attacks impact entities reliant on these chains for financial or political gain. Hence, ensuring a secure supply chain is crucial.
While supply chain attacks are often “spray and pray” tactics, they can also target specific organizations. Global cybercrimes on supply chains are estimated to grow by 15% each year. As these attacks evolve, it becomes clear that organizations lacking a comprehensive secure supply chain management strategy are at a higher risk of disruption, financial loss, and reputational damage.
Attackers are increasingly using emerging technologies to enhance their methods. There are multiple types of supply chain attacks, including upstream/downstream attacks, midstream attacks, CI/CD infrastructure attacks, and open-source attacks. One common yet overlooked method involves using hardware attack tools, which may come pre-installed on devices or be implanted at any point along the supply chain.
What is a Hardware-Based Supply Chain Attack?
A hardware-based attack is complex but highly significant. Such attacks are extremely difficult to detect and mitigate, as they often involve tampering with hardware. Traditional cybersecurity solutions typically lack physical layer visibility (Layer 1) to detect hardware unusual changes, meaning that unwanted hardware implants and associated risks often go unnoticed. The lack of Layer 1 visibility enables successful hardware-based attacks that can wreak havoc, from data breaches to ransomware attacks. Integrating a robust secure supply chain management strategy can greatly reduce the risk of hardware-based attacks by carefully checking suppliers and their products.
Currently, many organizations have not fully optimized their secure supply chains. Many companies lack security standards for their suppliers. Additionally, one-third do not regularly monitor or risk-assess them. This creates significant vulnerabilities, where a single malicious hardware attack tool could trigger a cascade effect throughout the supply chain or infiltrate a company.
Mitigating Hardware-Based Supply Chain Threats
Hardware-based supply chain threats come in two forms. First, a supplier may become a victim of a hardware-based attack, thereby becoming a potential liability to your company’s cybersecurity. Second, a device might get compromised within the supply chain before reaching your organization. Such threats stem from insufficient Layer 1 visibility, reducing an organization’s knowledge of its threat landscape and allowing risks to go ignored. Although suppliers inherently pose cybersecurity risks, companies can reduce these risks by implementing solutions with Layer 1 visibility. These solutions verify the integrity of devices received from suppliers, ensuring they remain secure.
Ensuring a Secure Supply Chain
Addressing potential hardware compromises along the supply chain is essential. Using Sepio’s platform, organizations can ensure that only legitimate devices operate within their environments. Sepio’s platform provides a solution to the visibility gap by covering the Physical Layer and offering comprehensive asset visibility. With Sepio’s Layer 1 visibility, no device goes unmanaged, enabling identification, detection, and management of IT/OT/IoT devices. This visibility underpins the solution’s policy enforcement mechanism and Rogue Device Mitigation feature. It instantly detects and blocks any unapproved or rogue hardware through automated mitigation by third-party tools.
Zero Trust Hardware Access, powered by Sepio’s solution, provides frontline protection. This ensures that compromised devices cannot bypass Zero Trust security protocols, regardless of how many suppliers they pass through before reaching your organization.
Sepio’s platform uses resources wisely, needing no hardware resources and without monitoring traffic. It delivers complete asset visibility and detects rogue or vulnerable devices within 24 hours. Given the critical role of supply chain security in national security, especially for infrastructure providers, robust secure supply chain management is essential to prevent harmful attacks.
Secure Your Supply Chain Against Cyber Threats
Protect your supply chain from cyber threats with Sepio’s Layer 1 visibility and Rogue Device Mitigation solution. Effective secure supply chain management protects organizations against physical and digital threats, ensuring resilient operations.
Schedule a demo to discover how Sepio can protect your organization from hardware-based attacks before they infiltrate your environment. Don’t wait for a breach—secure your supply chain now!
