Supply Chain Attacks Are Closing In On MSPs

If you attended Black Hat this year, you couldn’t avoid the topic of supply chain attacks. From keynotes to vendor messaging to booth presentations, they were a ubiquitous topic in Las Vegas this year.

Supply chain attacks are cyberattacks targeting an upstream vendor for the ultimate purpose of compromising one or more of its customers. Cybercriminals are aware that, by compromising updates from trusted vendors, they can easily bypass installed security software to infect all customers that install it.

Essentially, compromising a software vendor allows damage to cascade down the supply chain to another supplier– a consequence sometimes known as the “waterfall effect” – to increase collateral damage against multiple targets.

Black Hat founder Jeff Moss even began this year’s conference with a few words about software supply chains.

“We all rely on the software supply chain,” he said. “We’re building tools and systems based on it. We’re trusting it. We’re hoping that people in the supply chain…are doing things to help everyone else in the supply chain. Because, if they don’t, everything we do is potentially vulnerable.”

“We all depend on the supply chain being fully immunized,” he continued, “and it’s not there yet.”

Now, “not there yet” is putting it mildly. A few recent, high-profile attacks bear recalling to demonstrate the scope of the problem.