Threat explanation: Supply Chain Attacks

I learned this relatively recently, good explanation.   

Threat Explainer: Supply Chain Attacks, By Ben Nahorney,   Cisco

Let’s say that you’re confident in your security posture. You have endpoint protection in place, firewalls defending the perimeter, and phishing filters on incoming email. You’ve leveraged tools to check for anomalies in your network traffic, rolled out an SSO solution, and implemented processes to securely connect to the network remotely.

These defenses make it harder for bad actors to compromise your organization. Strong security posture is more likely to push all bad actors to move on to other, less secure targets.

It’s at this crossroad, between motivation and less secure targets, where supply chain attacks sit. Bad actors will always look for weak points to attack. It may be that your weakest point is not within your own organization, but within one of your suppliers. You trust their products and services, relying on them to conduct business. Unfortunately, if their security posture isn’t as mature as yours, attackers can exploit that trust and use it in attacks.

This is what a supply chain attack is. In these attacks, bad actors compromise a secondary organization that supplies software or services to a primary, target organization. Their goal is to compromise the primary target when they use the software or service of the secondary target. In short, they piggyback on the secondary target to get their malicious code into the primary target.

How the attack works

There is a general pattern in supply chain attacks. First, the bad actors gather what information they can find about the primary target. The attackers assess the suppliers of those products and services and then choose a secondary target. This secondary target now becomes the fulcrum of the attack.

Next, the bad actors attempt to compromise the secondary target. The ways they go about doing so will vary, often choosing the path of least resistance. They could try anything from spear phishing to exploiting vulnerabilities at the network edge. The choice will largely depend where the attackers perform reconnaissance to determine a successful breach. .... '