Written by Hattie Irving – Cyberfort Security Consultant
With the UK Government’s 2025 Cyber Security breaches survey reporting that just 14% of UK companies have reviewed their supply chain risks posed by their immediate suppliers, and 7% have reviewed their wider supply chain in the last 12 months is it time organisations started to take their supply chain security risks more seriously?
At Cyberfort in recent months we have been exploring why supply chain security is still such a ‘blind spot’ for many organisations. Afterall most people reading this article will know supply chains are widely interconnected and will have some understanding of security risks posed by their supply chain. So why is this area of cyber security still not being taken seriously enough? Are supply chains too complex for organisations to map or is supply chain security being left behind with other conflicting priorities taking precedence?
In this article we explore why supply chain cyber security needs to be taken more seriously, practical actions organisations should undertake and how to mitigate supply chain compromise risks.
Dispelling the Supply Chain Security Control Myth’s
Let’s start with a reality check. Most organisations have direct relationships with tens or hundreds of third-party suppliers. Those suppliers have their own suppliers, and those suppliers have theirs. Within these layers of separation, an organisations sensitive data and critical systems are potentially exposed to thousands of companies, operating under security postures your organisation has never reviewed, and you can’t effectively monitor.
Unfortunately, along the way supply chain security has fallen into a ‘tick-box exercise’ trap. Many organisations are building their supply chain security on a foundation of trust and verification that assumes good faith, static relationships, and accurate self-reporting; this as opposed to auditing and testing suppliers’ security controls.
But the reality is supply chains are dynamic, interconnected, and muddled. Compliance reports provide a ‘point in time’ snapshot that are outdated the moment they are published. It reflects what they believe to be true, not what actually is true.
From our experience at Cyberfort we have identified 5 common challenges organisations are facing when it comes to supply chain cyber security:
Low recognition or understanding of the risk that poor supply chain security can pose
Lack of investment to protect against supply chain risk
Limited visibility of supply chains
Insufficient tools and expertise to evaluate suppliers cyber security practices
Not knowing what you can ask of your suppliers
These challenges may appear easy to recognise and resolve on the surface. But the reality is, due to the complexities involved with supply chain security, the actions required to overcome them can be challenging without expert support.
Why is supply chain security a problem?
Managing supply chain security is the responsibility of all businesses. Organisations who do not consider their cyber security posture an important part of their supply chain operations are putting their customers and potentially industry at risk of attack.
A lack of understanding of your organisations supply chain can leave you vulnerable to:
Software supply chain attacks – attackers will undermine security on a software system, library or product enabling access to organisations which use the product. SolarWinds is a key example of a software supply chain attack when a routine patch deployed by the company spread malicious software to their customers which had been added to the application after SolarWinds had audited their code. Any user using the infected Orion software and connected to the Internet would now be compromised.
Service provider supply chain attacks – attackers will target managed service providers (MSPs) or IT infrastructure vendors to reach as many clients at once. This was brought to global attention last year when M&S, Co-op and Harrods were all compromised by DragonForce who used social engineering to undermine security of IT helpdesk staff at Tata Consultancy Service (TCS).
Hardware supply chain attacks – malicious actors will undermine the authenticity of physical components during manufacturing to gain persistence in their targeted supply chain. One of the early examples of hardware supply chain attacks is Stuxnet – a worm introduced into the network of the Iranian nuclear defence facility via infected USB drives combining both hardware and software attack.
So what does this tell us? Your organisation may have already been indirectly compromised without even realising it.
Even if you detect anomalous activity in your environment, determining whether it originated from your infrastructure or came through a supplier is difficult. Modern attacks are designed to blend in with legitimate traffic, leveraging authorised access and trusted relationships to avoid detection.
When supplier credentials are compromised/stolen and used to access systems, the activity looks legitimate. When malicious code is injected into a software update, your systems install it voluntarily. When a compromised supplier employee account accesses your data, all the logs show is authorised access.
This creates a detection problem that most security teams are not equipped to solve.
Compliance doesn’t equal supply chain security
One of the major reasons supply chain security remains a ‘blind spot’ for many organisations is the misconception that ‘passing a compliance audit must mean we are secure’.
ISO certifications, SOC 2 reports, and supplier security questionnaires are all important and have their place. But they create the appearance of diligence without reducing risk. Compliance frameworks are minimum baselines, not security guarantees. They measure what organisations claim to do, not what they actually do. They assess controls at a point in time, not continuously. Suppliers holding ISO 27001 is like having a valid MoT, your car has obtained the minimum roadworthiness. However it does not tell the us anything about that vehicles performance, how it is driven or how it performs under high levels of strain. Just because it has a pass today does not mean it will still be usable next week or month.
It’s important to note that the threat landscape evolves daily. New vulnerabilities are discovered, attack techniques emerge, suppliers change their infrastructure and implement new security practices. Quite often these recent changes are not reflected in certifications your organisation reviewed during supplier onboarding.
The harsh reality is an organisation can have a fully compliant supply chain and still be compromised.
Understanding Visibility Gaps
Most organisations have no idea what’s actually happening in their supply chain. As identified by the UK Government’s Cyber Breaches survey mentioned earlier in this article. Most businesses know who their suppliers are and might know what data and services they access. But they almost certainly don’t know what their suppliers’ suppliers are doing, what subprocesses are involved, where data is actually stored, or who has access to their systems at any given moment.
You cannot defend what you cannot see. You cannot detect anomalies in relationships you don’t monitor. You cannot respond to incidents in systems you don’t understand. You cannot recover from breaches when you don’t know how deep the compromise goes.
Modern attack methods exploit this gap. They compromise the parts of your supply chain that your organisation is not watching or monitoring and move through connections you didn’t know existed.
Does your Incident Response Plan incorporate your organisations supply chain?
Imagine discovering a breach tomorrow. Your incident response plan leaps into action. You isolate systems, contain the damage, begin forensic analysis. You notify customers, regulators, stakeholders.
Now imagine discovering that the breach originated from a supplier. Which supplier? When did it start? What data was accessed? How many other customers of that supplier are affected? Does the supplier even know they’re compromised?
Welcome to the supply chain incident response nightmare.
Traditional incident response assumes you control the compromised infrastructure. But in supply chain attacks, the initial compromise happened somewhere else, possibly weeks or months ago, in systems you don’t own, can’t access, and may not even know about.
Your ability to contain the breach depends on a third party’s ability to detect it, understand it, and respond to it. Your timeline for notification is limited by how long it takes the supplier to realise they’re the source. Your recovery depends on trusting that the supplier has fully remediated their systems before you re-establish the connection.
This is not a position you want to be in.
Do you know what your organisation can ask of its suppliers?
Supplier assessment can be easily overcomplicated. At Cyberfort we suggest you start small and map suppliers out – include software vendors, cloud services and anyone who has access to your data. From here rank them by criticality to your operations – who has the most access, who handles the most sensitive data and who can your business not survive without.
Once you’ve got a comprehensive list of your suppliers, track their answers to the following questions to better understand your supply chain security.
- Do you have ISO27001 or cyber essentials certification?
- Have you had a data breach, when and what happened?
- How do you train your staff on security?
- Have you assessed your suppliers security?
- How is access to data controlled within your organisation?
How can you use your suppliers answers to better protect your business
Once you have defined your supplier’s security posture and understand what they do to protect themselves you can begin to think how to better protect your organisation.
Stress testing – test your suppliers security measures through tabletop and live exercises. Use simulations of low and high impact events to understand the limitations of your incident management process.
Incident and crisis management – Establish an effective incident management process to improve business resilience, support business continuity and reduce financial impact.
- Ensure you have an agreed incident management process with your suppliers.
- Run a crisis simulation exercise to model supply chain compromise and work through the initial steps your organisation would undertake.
- Be prepared to provide support and assistance to suppliers where security incidents have thew potential to impact your organisation or the wider supply chain.
- Share information with suppliers to help prevent them falling victim to cyber-attacks.
Be aware of your horizon – changes in the types of cyber threat you are experiencing, vulnerabilities, best practices and technology may impact your supply chain security. Be aware of changes to geo-politics and the economy which may impact your business and its overarching supply chain security. Consider undertaking a threat modelling session to understand your key threats and how they may materialise for your business.
Ensure contracts have clauses to enforce high cyber security standards for suppliers. Any which have access to your company data should be compliant with your defined cyber security standards.
Consider cyber security insurance to work in parallel with your protective measures. If the worst case scenario does happen insurance will cover ongoing business costs which have arisen from dealing with a breach.
Final Thoughts
Managing supply chain risk doesn’t need to be a complex and time-consuming endeavour, taking small informed steps to begin mapping suppliers is the starting point. Ask them the right questions and plan appropriate mitigations around them and their suppliers is a great way to get started to fortify your businesses cyber operations. Start small with just one supplier to outline a process which works for you and your suppliers and build from there.
In 2026 it’s important to take supply chain security seriously. Based on what we have seen over the past 12 months it is highly likely your supply chain is already compromised. Somewhere in your supplier ecosystem, there’s a vulnerability waiting to be discovered, credentials waiting to be stolen, or an access point waiting to be abused.
The organisations that survive the next generation of supply chain attacks won’t be the ones with the most certifications or the longest supplier questionnaires. They’ll be the ones who built systems that assume compromise and invested in continuous visibility and response capabilities required to operate in a hostile environment.
The question is no longer whether you’ll face a supply chain attack. It’s whether you’ll detect it and bounce back from it should the worst happen and your organisation is breached. If this all feels too complex for you and your team seek professional guidance from an MSSP partner with the right credentials.
For more information about Cyberfort Supply Chain security services contact us at [email protected] and one of our experts will be in touch.
