Security News

Supply chain attacks are on the rise, and many organizations seem unsure on how to respond to the threat, but I'm here to tell you that there are several steps you can take to minimize your risk of being involved in a supply chain breach. To minimize any unknowns, start with a full audit of your IT environment, including any unapproved shadow IT. You need to understand exactly what hardware, software and SaaS products are being used, where the security gaps lie, and which vendors and partners your business relies on - including the nature of those interactions, from the types of data they process to system interfaces and various levels of integration.

The shift to cloud-native development, along with the increased speed in development brought about by the adoption of DevOps processes, has made the challenges connected with securing software supply chains infinitely more complex, according to recent research from Venafi. In this Help Net Security video, Kevin Bocek, VP of Threat Intelligence and Business Development, Venafi, discusses how CIOs are becoming increasingly concerned about the serious business disruptions, revenue loss, data theft, and customer damage that can result from successful software supply chain attacks.

It has also given the cybercriminal community new routes to break into systems, either by exploiting existing vulnerabilities in the software supply chain or by surreptitiously inserting their own. So just imagine how you'd feel if you found out that a software component or library that you'd developed had a vulnerability that left not just you, but your downstream customers and partners open to attack?

Researchers at ReversingLabs have uncovered evidence of a widespread software supply chain attack through malicious JavaScript packages picked up via NPM. NPM was acquired by Microsoft-owned GitHub in 2020 and has suffered from the odd issue or two over the years. The latest problem stems from typo-squatting, where an attacker offers up malicious packages with names similar to real packages.

An NPM supply-chain attack dating back to December 2021 used dozens of malicious NPM modules containing obfuscated Javascript code to compromise thousands of downstream desktop apps and websites. As researchers at supply chain security firm ReversingLabs discovered, the threat actors behind this campaign used typosquatting to infect developers looking for very popular packages, such as umbrellajs and ionic.io NPM modules.

Over the last two years, supply chain challenges have rocked both enterprises and consumers alike, making it harder to access certain goods and maintain business continuity. Security threats have only heightened these concerns, and an ISACA survey report illuminates IT professionals' key concerns around supply chain security challenges and how their organizations are responding to them.

There have been more than 200 dedicated supply chain attacks over the past decade. If the supply chain is anything that potentially gives you an opportunity to hop to another target, just about everything - including you - is part of the supply chain.

Security threats have only heightened these concerns, and an ISACA survey report illuminates IT professionals' key concerns around supply chain security challenges and how their organizations are responding to them. The report received responses from more than 1,300 IT professionals with supply chain insight, 25 percent of whom note that their organization experienced a supply chain attack in the last 12 months.

Major supply-chain attacks of recent years - we're talking about SolarWinds, Kaseya and Log4j to name a few - are "Just the tip of the iceberg at this point," according to Aanchal Gupta, who leads Microsoft's Security Response Center. As the head of MSRC, Gupta has a unique vantage point.

The shift to cloud native development, along with the increased speed in development brought about by the adoption of DevOps processes, has made the challenges connected with securing software supply chains infinitely more complex. Adversaries, motivated by the success of high-profile software supply chain attacks on companies like SolarWinds and Kaseya, are stepping up attacks against software build and distribution environments.