What is a Supply Chain Attack?
Supply chain attacks are conducted by introducing a harmful payload through a built-in part of a supplier or third-party vendor. The lack of public knowledge of cyber dangers and the loosely connected structure of modern, cloud-native apps have led to a surge in supply chain attacks with significant economic consequences in recent years. Supply chain attacks sometimes referred to as value chain or third-party attacks, target open-source software and commercial, off-the-shelf solutions that have known security flaws. Its effects can range from innocent exploits to a total compromise of the supply chain.
Categories of Supply Chain Attack:
- Hardware-based: An application is hosted on insecure hardware that connects to users insecurely. Gadgets with pre-installed malware and network devices that are accessible to the whole public are two examples of such things. These attacks are aimed to infect gadgets during the earliest steps of the deployment stage, which are later abused for a more profound, network-wide compromise.
- Software-based: These attacks spread vulnerabilities throughout the operating system, libraries, source code, and practically every other piece of software utilized in an application. Such software components have inherent weaknesses that are further exploited to introduce malware and harmful code that can shut down the entire supply chain.
- Firmware-based: In order to launch these supply chain attacks, malicious code must be injected into a device's boot code. Even though firmware-based supply chain attacks are quick to execute and challenging to detect, they are one of the most often adopted tactics by cybercriminals to attack supply chain systems.
The Impacts of a Supply Chain Attack:
The attack surface that can be repeatedly exploited in an attack sequence is expanded by the reusability of software components in the delivery of new applications. This is usually because taking advantage of a flaw in one component might lead to misuse of the entire supply chain. Supply chain attacks have the following impacts:
- Malware infections: Attackers use third-party software flaws to introduce harmful code and programs into the pipeline for creating applications. The outcome of an attack ultimately varies depending on the sophistication of the malware and the data stored on the target system.
- Data breaches and disclosures: Supply chain flaws are used by malicious actors to insert data exfiltration tools into software development pipelines. Any data that travels via the exfiltration tool, including data at the user and system levels, is transferred to a host that is under the control of the attacker.
- Financial loss: Supply chain attacks on retailers, credit card companies, and e-commerce sites frequently result in a direct financial loss from identity fraud. Companies that suffer data breaches as a result of supply chain attacks also face severe fines from regulatory bodies and even lose their reputation.
How to Identify Supply Chain Vulnerabilities:
Here are two of the most popular techniques for identifying supply chain vulnerabilities, while distinct use cases could necessitate unique ways to suit their deployment framework:
Continuous vulnerability scanning: In order to identify potential vulnerabilities throughout a complete supply chain, developers and security teams should work together to perform automated, continuous vulnerability checks. The source code, processes, and services that are vulnerable to attacks can be found using an ongoing scanning procedure. An advanced supply chain vulnerability assessment should generate a list of all the deployed components, together with a component-level threat assessment, and a vulnerability score for every piece of third-party software.
Penetration testing: Developers and QA teams should test each vulnerability after discovering third-party security risks in order to recreate the most likely attack flow that bad actors could potentially use. Teams could also create a honeypot of fake information and features for ethical hacking and penetration testing. To ensure observability and the discovery of vulnerable endpoints, these honeypots can also be outfitted with endpoint detection tools. Comprehensive penetration tests simulate attack behaviors and offer insightful data on how criminals might use supply chain vulnerabilities for exploits.
Prevention Techniques for Supply Chain Attacks:
Cyberattack mitigation techniques for insecure supply chains include:
Utilize reliable Identity and Access Management (IAM) security measures: The central management of the account and data access controls is made possible via an IAM dashboard. Administrators can swiftly mitigate and stop privilege escalations or other hacker post-compromise activities by managing permissions through a single service.
Zero-trust cybersecurity infrastructure: Zero-trust policies, which operate under the presumption that all users and applications might be bad actors, should be enforced by security teams. In order to prevent unauthorised requests for data access, critical services, and workloads should also be safeguarded by multifactor authentication and reauthorization controls.
Put network segmentation into effect: It is advised to impose targeted limitations on third-party software and service providers' access to specific pipeline components and services. Considered effective strategies are segmentation, which divides the network into many subnets based on functionality, and microservices. In such cases, the rest of the deployment is kept secure even if a future supply chain attack compromises a portion of a network.
Malware protection: A supply chain assault sequence's main goal is to introduce malicious software into a weak framework. The use of forensic and anti-virus techniques, however, regarded as a reactive strategy, aids in the detection of malware in an existing supply chain system. Additionally, malware prevention provides a chance for early detection, enabling security teams to react to a compromise before the malware spreads throughout the entire supply chain.
The following are some of the main supply chain concerns in modern software:
- Fraud by vendors
- Insecure data exchange
- Data governance and visibility issues
- Open-source vulnerabilities
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