As a supply chain security vendor, the growth is far from surprising for us at Bytesafe - with the supply chain being a noticeable security blind spot for many organizations. A massive 62% of organizations claim to have been impacted by supply chain attacks in 2021 alone. Incidents like log4j, ua-parser-js and colors.js/faker.js have once again shown that it’s vital to use services like the Bytesafe Dependency Firewall.

We’ve heard a lot about “supply chains” of various industries over the past couple of years, and the cybersecurity sector is no exception. When Colonial Pipeline was compromised by ransomware, it affected the physical supply of gasoline to consumers. On the software side, malware distributed through a SolarWinds update and vulnerabilities discovered in Apache’s Log4J created rippling effects for organizations around the world.

What happens when the software, scripts and code snippets that your business uses on your website and network have been compromised at the source? The compromise could be unintentional—perhaps the coders simply made a mistake. Or the compromise could be intentional—maybe hackers wrote a malicious script and promoted it as legitimate on a third-party library source to encourage users to download and install.

A recent survey by the analyst firm Gartner showed that 89% of companies experienced a supplier risk event in the last five years; however, those companies' overall awareness and plans to mitigate lacked maturity. As a result, it is no longer enough to secure your own company's infrastructure. You must also evaluate the risk posed by third-party vendors and plan to monitor those organizations for breaches.

Forrester recently predicted that in 2022, 60% of security incidents would involve third parties. Yikes! With such a large percentage of incidents taking place outside the confines of their organizations, corporate leaders need to know what to do to protect their business. So, here is a list of items to address to succeed at supply chain risk (SCR) management.

Supply chain compromises are an increasing threat that impacts a range of sectors, with threat actors leveraging access to support several motivations including financial gain (such as with the Kaseya ransomware attack) and espionage. Throughout 2020, an operation attributed to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR) by the U.S.