Supply chain cyber-attacks 2021

The cyber attacks and data security are most important aspect for any business that is operating digitally. If you ask me, which is the deadliest cyber-attack a company can face? It will be supply chain attacks that are causing havoc for these businesses. Since the major focus of the attacker here is the source code through which they can identify the kind of updates the victim’s system is having and can give fake updates to install various malicious files to the linked devices. There are multiple ways an attacker can target your sensitive data.

To explain this in simple words, supply chain attack is a kind of cyber-attack which basically target the data corresponding to supply chain of any business. The attackers infiltrate your organization’s database and can easily find out the vendors who are using insecure system within your supply chain.

You might have heard the supply chain cyber-attack which occurred last year in U.S. An attack which nearly disturbed almost every U.S. Government Department and their sensitive data. The investigation of this attack is still going on. Can you imagine a country who is globally recognized as a superpower nation was unable to protect its data and find the culprit of this attack to this date? What if your organization got attacked by supply chain cyber-attackers? Can you comprehend the damage it can cause to your business and to which extent? This is the prime reason why cyber security measures are necessary and has to be taken by all kind of organization, irrespective of the size of organization.

So how to protect our system from these attacks?

There are various methods one can use, but the one method that I suggest is the “Red Team Test”. In this method two teams will be created “Blue Team” and “Red Team”, these two teams will act as dummies and will replicate the real-world attacks to another team. In this way you can understand how the attacker can infiltrate your system and how you can restrict that way. This method is best to analyze the loop holes in your current system.

Dependency confusion can also create a potential threat to the system, as generally developers includes 3rd party libraries in their program; attackers can easily fake these 3rd party libraries and include malicious code in the libraries. This is quite dangerous as the attacker will give the same name as your external links and package containing malicious code. To avoid the attacks caused by dependency confusion, one should increase the visibility and security of the packages & protect the names of system libraries so that the attacker cannot make duplicate libraries. This will help reduce the supply chain attacks. Protecting your system from external attacks is a difficult task and it is best to leave this to the expert hands.

Still wondering if you can protect your system from supply chain attacks? Find yourself a cyber security expert. Connect with us and we will help you to find best solution according to your business.