Your suppliers are a necessary part of your organization’s business. Because they provide crucial services — like billing and data storage —they become an indispensable part of your extended enterprise. Unfortunately, this also makes suppliers a target for cyber criminals. Threat actors often set their sights on suppliers and other third parties in order to compromise several targets at once. Planning your supply chain incident response ahead of an attack is an important part of protecting your assets from a third party breach.
How Flare Helps your Team with Supply Chain Incident Response
What is Flare’s approach to supply chain incident response?
When it comes to managing third party risk, it’s important to think of your cybersecurity posture holistically. Flare’s Supply Chain Ransomware Exposure Monitoring gives your security team the full picture of risks across your entire supply chain. Flare automatically scans the clear and dark web, as well as prominent threat actor communities, for any assets that might have been leaked or stolen by a threat actor.
What do you get with Flare’s supply chain incident response solution?
- Automated monitoring: Automatically, thoroughly, and effectively track external threats, decreasing the time needed to address risks.
- Relevant alerts: Threat intelligence can be overwhelming, especially when you’re dealing with alerts about your entire supply chain. Flare’s solution provides a concise and contextual overview of threat actor behaviors, enabling your security team to respond to risks faster.
- A proactive security stance: By actively seeking out potential leaks, you can catch breaches early and take steps to protect your data, systems, and networks.
Why use Flare to help with supply chain incident response?
The more suppliers you have, the larger your attack surface is. Flare provides your team with insights and monitoring that can give you an edge when it comes to managing all the potential attack vectors in your supply chain. By bringing diverse data sources into one platform, Flare allows you to manage and prioritize a large amount of threat intelligence, so you can more quickly mount a supply chain incident response.
A Closer Look at Supply Chain Incident Responses
What is a supply chain threat?
A supply chain cyber threat, or a third-party threat is any cyber risk that comes from the third parties your organization does business with in order to make or distribute your product. This includes several suppliers, such as contractors, manufacturers, vendors, or other service providers. As with your own organization, these threats can stem from attacks on those suppliers or from vulnerabilities that may expose your data or networks.
How does a supply chain incident response address third party risk?
A supply chain incident response plan addresses cyber risk to your supply chain by establishing a comprehensive approach to identifying, managing, and mitigating the potential threats posed by third-party vendors, suppliers, and partners. There are several steps in such a plan:
- Risk assessment and identification: Regularly assess the risk levels of third-party vendors by evaluating their security practices, compliance with regulations, and overall risk posture.
- Contractual agreements and SLAs: By including specific security requirements and incident response obligations in contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) with third parties, you can seek to mitigate risk.
- Monitoring and threat detection: Continuous monitoring for signs of compromise and the sharing of threat intelligence is important to a supply incident response plan.
- Incident response planning: Develop integrated incident response plans that include third-party incident response procedures.
- Incident handling and coordination: Coordinate with third-party vendors during incident investigations and response efforts to ensure a cohesive approach.
- Mitigation and remediation: Implement stringent access controls and segment network access to limit the impact of a third-party breach.
Integrate the world’s easiest to use and most comprehensive cybercrime database into your security program in 30 minutes.
Is speed important in a supply chain incident response?
When a threat hits, it’s critical that your organization is ready to act fast. The longer an attacker is in your systems or networks (or in the network of a supplier), the more damage can be done. The same is true of compromised data — the longer it’s out there, the more of an impact that leaked data can have on you and your supply chain. Threat intelligence is important when it comes to an effective supply chain incident response.
Why is an Effective Supply Chain Incident Response Plan Important in Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape?
Why do you need an effective supply chain incident response now?
Supply chain attacks are increasingly common; in fact, many organizations have already faced third-party breaches and attacks. According to the ITRC, supply chain breaches reached an all-time high in 2023, including one of the largest-ever third-party breaches, MOVEit. The MOVEit attack demonstrates how far-reaching a supply chain attack can be; while the attack directly impacted 102 organizations, it indirectly impacted 1,271 organizations.
What is the impact of a supply chain cyber incident?
Supply chain cyber breaches tend to have a deeper impact than other types of cyber attacks. For example, they are more difficult to detect than a direct attack on your own systems and networks. For this reason, third party breaches tend to last longer and cost more. According to a report from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, third party compromises cost an average of 12% more than a typical breach, and also take 13% longer to find and contain. This is just the financial impact, however. Third-party attacks cause other types of damage as well:
- Legal consequences and fines
- Reputational loss
- Exposure and theft of proprietary information
- Potential for future attacks
Can you prevent cyber attacks on your supply chain?
The challenge with supply side attacks is that although your suppliers can be a central part of your business, they don’t work for you. You can’t make their employees take your cybersecurity training, for example. You can, however, vet your suppliers. Traditionally this has been done by incorporating cybersecurity measures into vendor contracts, and requiring vendors to fill out questionnaires. More recently, organizations are moving toward more collaborative and tailored approaches to managing third party risk, including vendor-specific playbooks and increased monitoring.
Building a Supply Chain Incident Response with Flare
Flare provides the leading Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution for organizations. Our technology constantly scans the online world, including the clear & dark web, to discover unknown events, automatically prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Monitor your supply chain’s risk with Flare.
Our solution integrates into your security program in 30 minutes to provide your team with actionable intelligence and automated remediation for high-risk exposure. See it yourself with our free trial.
