Cyber Defense eMagazine December Edition for 2021

government has offered a bounty of up to $10million (£7.4m) for information about the group, the largest
bounty of its kind.
The IT industry is not immune from supply chain attacks either. SolarWinds suffered an attack last year
with hackers gaining access to the production system for Orion, SolarWinds’ flagship software. While in
July, Kaseya, a provider of IT management software for MSPs and small to medium-sized businesses
suffered a ransomware attack. As with the SolarWinds attack, the malware spread amongst Kaseya’s
clients and affected dozens of businesses.
So while organisations must manage the potential fallout of security breaches to themselves –
reputational damage, disruption costs and more – the knock-on effect to customers, partners and the
rest of the supply chain is potentially huge.
Digitisation of the supply chain
The ongoing digitisation of the supply chain, often through the cloud, has delivered major efficiency and
cost benefits, with shared data and systems in areas such as integrated planning and execution systems,
logistics visibility, autonomous logistics, smart procurement and warehousing, spare parts management
and analytics.
For a big company like Siemens, for example, working at the bleeding edge of supply chain innovation,
the creation of a cloud-based operating system means that it can process data in real time from millions
of devices and sensors in plants, systems, machinery and products dispersed throughout production
processes and supply chains.
Siemens may be working towards ‘supply chain nirvana’, where processes and decisions happen with
minimal human intervention. But the reality for many suppliers, logistics companies, manufacturers and
retailers is that business happens in browsers, on email and with shared files. The more we use the
Internet to collaborate and communicate, the more we are exposed. Research has shown that web and
email attacks are behind 90% 2 of all breaches.
The increased adoption of cloud applications within the supply chain, accelerated by the challenges of
COVID, has made the browser the most important productivity tool on any endpoint. But at the same
time, the majority of cyber attacks start with the browser, and it doesn’t take much for a determined
attacker to understand your key suppliers and partners and use this to target users with phishing emails
and infected attachments, websites and downloadable documents.
2
Sources Google, Verisign
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