{"id":43754,"date":"2024-02-15T09:23:30","date_gmt":"2024-02-15T09:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=43754"},"modified":"2024-02-15T09:23:30","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T09:23:30","slug":"confronting-the-alarming-rise-of-supply-chain-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/confronting-the-alarming-rise-of-supply-chain-attacks\/43754\/","title":{"rendered":"Confronting the alarming rise of supply chain attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"
Supply chain attacks remain one of the most serious threats to cyber security<\/a> that exist today. With the number of attacks increasing by nearly 750% per year<\/a> between 2019-2022, it\u2019s clear that threat actors have identified increasingly integrated digital supply chains as an extremely effective and lucrative way to gain access to networks and data.<\/p>\n The main challenge lies in securing what can be extremely complex supply chains, not least because vulnerabilities can be introduced or exploited by threat actors at any stage. Typically, these attacks succeed when cyber criminals manage to infiltrate technology infrastructure indirectly by exploiting weaknesses in less secure suppliers, vendors, or partners of the actual target organisation.<\/p>\n Although the concept of attacking digital supply chains has been around for many years, incidents only started gathering significant attention following the massive SolarWinds breach in 2020, which impacted thousands of public and private sector organisations globally. This was followed by many more breaches, such as those involving Kaseya and Quanta in 2021 and high-profile attacks on Okta and Kojima Industries Corp last year, which collectively are estimated to have cost around $60bn.<\/p>\n A closer look at the significant incidents that have taken place this year reveals the extensive damage a single vulnerability can cause. The MOVEit flaw<\/a>, identified in June, set off a series of major breaches, incurring costs of nearly $10bn for businesses and impacting over 1,000 organisations.<\/p>\n It also underlined a strategic shift in criminal tactics, with perpetrators increasingly focusing on supply chains rather than individual companies, adopting broader, less targeted approaches in the process.<\/p>\n For many threat actors, it makes more sense to compromise the entire underlying platform rather than a single element because it has the potential to yield significantly greater results. Attacking a virtualiser, for example, which governs numerous Virtual Machines (VMs) is more effective than targeting a single VM, while it’s more effective to bypass the login of an enterprise server than to target an individual employee.<\/p>\n Supply chain attacks can generally be divided into two overall types: macro and micro attacks. Macro attacks target widely used corporate systems, such as the MOVEit file transfer technology, and are responsible for many of the most notable and harmful incidents in recent times. Micro attacks, however, focus on specific technologies, like open-source repositories where access is public.<\/p>\n Despite macro attacks being used in the most high-profile supply chain breaches, the risks posed by micro attacks are equally important. Vulnerabilities in services and software, such as Log4Shell, ProxyLogon, Spring4Shell, Confluence RCE, and ICMAD SAP, may not traditionally be viewed as supply chain attacks.<\/p>\n However, entities like Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups and government-backed hacking units often exploit these more targeted vulnerabilities with significant success.<\/p>\n Put this all together, and it\u2019s easy to understand why the use of advanced ransomware and malware in supply chain attacks continues to grow.<\/p>\n In addition, threat actors are now using sophisticated languages, such as RUST and GO, in malware payloads which contributes to a higher attack success rate. Even more concerning for security and IT teams is that almost all ransomware infiltrations take less than four hours to execute, with the fastest attacks taking control of systems in less than 45 minutes<\/a>, according to industry data.<\/p>\nDissecting the threat and escalating dangers<\/h3>\n